Ryan William the Art of Savage Discovery How to Blame the Victim Essays

For the final post of 2012 we were asked to reflect on politics over the final year. In thinking on this for the last calendar week I've drafted most x first paragraphs. The writer's block arises not from aught to say, but from a place that wonders how many means at that place are to depict how awful the Gillard government is.

How many ways at that place are to verbalise that the political crisis of the Australian elites is playing out in increasingly cruel ways: from the demonising of aviary seekers and placing them in harms mode to the smearing of Indigenous communities and the implementation of policies that stigmatise. From cutting single parents benefits to forcing people living with disabilities onto Newstart, to the rollout of the Basics Card, to the poor who are supposedly incapable of managing their government benefits in Bankstown. All these are policies roundly condemned by non-government bodies and many international welfare agencies. Some, like the Nuts Carte, are fifty-fifty condemned by the government's own research. At times I've felt there is picayune left to say other than to verbalise despair.

I've been reminded again and over again of certain passages from William Ryan's How to Blame the Victim, in particular the first chapter 'The Art of Savage Discovery'. I read this work again recently, and this time was particularly struck by its criticism of public policy makers and politicians:

Victim-blaming is cloaked in kindness and concern, and bears all the trappings of statistical furbelows of scientism; it is obscured by a perfumed haze of humanitarianism.

[…]

The old-fashioned conservative could hold firmly to the belief that the oppressed and the victimised were born that way — "that way" being lacking and inadequate in grapheme or power. The new ideology attributes defect and inadequacy to the malignant nature of poverty, injustice, slum life, and racial difficulties. The stigma that marks the victim and accounts or his victimisation is an acquired stigma, a stigma of social, rather than genetic origin. But the stigma, the defect, the fatal difference — though derived in the past from environmental forces — is all the same located within the victim, inside his (sic) skin.

[… ]

Discovering savages, then, is an essential component of, and prerequisite to, Blaming the Victim, and the art of Brutal Discovery is a cadre skill that must be caused past all aspiring Victim Blamers. They must acquire how to demonstrate that the poor, the black, the sick, the jobless, the slum tenants, are dissimilar and foreign. They must learn to conduct or interpret the research that shows how "these people" think in different forms, act in different patterns, cling to unlike values, seek different goals, and learn unlike truths. Which is to say that they are strangers, barbarians, savages.

In this way, those harmed by backer club are reconstituted into individuals within whom sits the crusade of their distress and 'predicament'. As if these predicaments were not entirely socially synthetic by global and national distributions of power and wealth.

Calls from progressive groups and individuals to take action are often fabricated to the land — in particular to politicians — request that something exist done. Nevertheless it is these politicians and their parties who have constructed the latest government of harmful public policy in Commonwealth of australia. It is no accident that Indigenous people are stigmatised through income management. It is no accident that thousands sit in refugee camps just off our borders. It is no accident that government benefits are so low people cannot pay rent and buy nutrient (see this ACTU graph comparing averages wages, minimum wages and Newstart or this one comparing international equivalents of Newstart).

While Ryan is talking above about the U.s. some decade ago, just as this sort of policy framework was emerging, nosotros tin see the same process here and elsewhere today. As Owen Jones says of the contemporary United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland state of affairs:

Hatred against those receiving benefits is out of control in Cameron'southward United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland. The Tories transformed a crisis of capitalism into a crunch of public spending, and determined that the most vulnerable would brand the biggest sacrifices. But taking away support from the disabled, the unemployed and the working poor is not straightforward. It can only exist achieved by a entrada of demonisation – to beat any potential sympathy. Do good recipients must but appear equally feckless, workshy scroungers, living in opulent quasi-mansions with wall-to-wall widescreen TVs, rampaging around the Canary Islands courtesy of handouts from the squeezed taxpayer. Benefit fraud does exist – according to Government estimates, information technology is worth less than 1 per cent of welfare spending – but the most extreme examples are passed off every bit representative, or as the "tip of the iceberg". The reality is all but airbrushed out of existence.

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it?

For me, 2012 volition get downward as a yr of reasserting the dominance of the political-economical gild of neoliberalism in the wake of the 2007–08 global economic crisis. Austerity, budget cuts, blaming individuals who can't cope with their economic situation, and the vilification of those that should rightly rely on government assistance.

Even so, I don't desire to finish on such a low note and there is no need to. There are things this year that have inspired me and will bulldoze me to practice more to bring a better globe into being. Or as I heard Larissa Behrendt say a few months agone: we can strive to be the all-time version of ourselves we can be.

Existence a victim in the sense I hateful it, and in the style outlined above, is non to imply passivity. Omid Sorousheh, the 35-twelvemonth-sometime Iranian hunger striker on Nauru, resisted by refusing to eat until he was shut to death – role of a collective hunger strike inside the detention centre. Ethnic communities continue to oppose the Northern Territory Intervention, and refuse to accept the more 2 centuries sometime occupation of their land. In Gaza, amongst rockets falling and the killing of those severely repressed by the Israeli state, the voices of victims who resist are heard.

At times these voices are thunderous across the world, such as with the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia and the movement of the Indignados and Occupy protesters. While those events were 2011'southward flash points, I can't help just think there will be more of the unexpected in 2013. Capitalism, and the governments that protect the interests of the rich and powerful confronting the majority, take not settled accounts with their victims. Those they exploit, maim, harm and denigrate take always resisted. It is only the course it occurs in, and the direction it takes, that needs to reveal itself.

I want to end with a vocal and video I showtime heard and saw this year, effectually the time of Invasion 24-hour interval/Australia Day. I can get a little obsessive virtually music. I don't play it a lot and I don't collect information technology very much, yet when an album or song makes my center sing it sits on repeat. Get-go up for high rotation in 2012 was 'Invasion 24-hour interval' by Little K. It is a good place to end the year as well every bit a reminder of the enormous backbone, decision and political focus of Indigenous activists whose fight, over many generations, is justly inspiring and moving.

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Source: https://overland.org.au/2012/12/2012-a-lesson-in-how-to-blame-the-victim/

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