Political cultures also foster sadism, justifying such behaviour by an alleged need to protect national security. And once specific population groups have been dehumanised, they become targets for cruelties.
Denial, bolstered by the fair-go image of state leaders, ensures that cruelty as policy continues unabated.
A short list of victims
For advocating the rights of Saudi women to drive, Loujain al-Hathloul was sentenced to five years and eight months in prison. Her conviction, for spying for foreign parties and conspiring against the Kingdom, was handed down after Loujain had been in detention for three years.
In a Shanghai court, 37-year-old Zhang Zhang was sentenced to four years in prison for reporting on Chinese authorities’ responses to the Covid outbreak in Wuhan. Her conviction referred to ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’.
In Israel at the beginning of December 2020, Defence for Children International reported that in a protest against an Israeli settler outpost, an Israeli soldier shot and killed 15-year-old Palestinian Ali Abu Aliya. Ali is the most recent of 155 Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces in the previous five years.
Three months before Ali’s death, Palestinian Mydi Ikhtat slipped through an Israeli separation fence to resume his work building the city of Be’er Sheva. He was hunted by Israeli border police as a shabah, an illegal, albeit in his own country. Gideon Levy of Haaretz reports that the police beat him with clubs and brass knuckles and revoked his permit. Only Jewish settlers may move freely.
In the United States in June 2018, following President Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policy, US officials at the US Mexican border separated more than 2,300 children from their parents. Initially warehoused in cages, the children were sent to detention centres spread across 17 states. At the beginning of 2021, the parents of 545 children still cannot be found.
In May 2020 the world witnessed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman, part of a pattern of 981 police killings that year. Fatal police shootings of Black Americans are twice that of white victims and much higher than for any other ethnic group.
In Indian-occupied Kashmir, internet services were banned, and the media muzzled, though independent reporters claim that during military operations, at least 229 Kashmiri citizens have been killed. Babar Qadri, a prominent lawyer who had defended Kashmir’s rights to self-determination, was assassinated in his home.
Amnesty International records that on October 20 and 21, in a peaceful protest in Lagos against police brutality, Nigerian soldiers shot and killed 12 protesters. At an official investigation, the army were said not to be present, then it was admitted they were there but only fired blank rounds into the air. Bullet casings found at the scene matched those used by the Nigerian army. Relatives of the victims have searched in vain for the bodies of their loved ones.
In the UK, refugees have been dying in Home Office accommodation, including in Glasgow where refugee rights campaigners report toxic conditions in hotels housing refugees. Clare Morley from Care4Calais says, ‘Many refugees have crossed the Sahara Desert and made it through the hell of Libya, facing unimaginable hardship to get this far. But the way we treat them in this country is cruel.’
In Melbourne, 60 refugees have been locked down for eight months, 23 hours a day. Unable to social distance and frightened of catching Covid, they must tolerate the cruelty of not knowing when they’ll be released. With the support of the parliamentary opposition’s Medevac legislation, the 60 young men had been brought to the mainland for medical treatment after years of offshore detention, but to gain revenge against their political opponents, the Morrison government must punish the refugees.
Explaining cruelty as policy
Inherent in cruelty as policy is a fascination with violence, as in leaders’ top-down abuse of power. Such practice may be direct, as in the indefinite containment of refugees, or indirect, as in neo-liberal economic policies that ensure millions of citizens go hungry or become homeless.
A banality of evil confounds any claim that only a few bad apples commit cruelty. In retrospect this looks like an evil of banality, so taken for granted are these shameful periods of history, so easily silenced are the populations in whose name these policies are pursued
In each state, large bureaucracies such as the US Department of Justice, Home Affairs in Australia, the UK’s Home Office and in Israel the Prison Service facilitate cruel policies even if staff might be reluctant to support them. Cruelty needs administrative records and processing.
Political cultures have fostered sadism, a pleasure in exercising control by hurting a person, an animal or the environment. Such conduct is justified by an alleged need to protect national security, and by pragmatism – do what you can get away with – in contexts that make cruelty toward the weak, such as asylum seekers, look like a mission.
President Trump hurries to execute federal prisoners. A British judge refuses bail for Julian Assange. The Israeli government provides Covid vaccines for hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers but not for Palestinians. In West Papua, Indigenous people face murder, rape and destruction by Indonesian forces. In Western Sahara, the Kingdom of Morocco maintains the systematic repression of Sahrawis fighting for rights of self-determination.
Not to be outdone in the cruelty stakes, the thuggish government of Russian President Putin imprisons the impressively brave Alexei Navalny.
Fostering humanitarian alternatives
After the Second World War, citizens’ expectations, leaders’ values and political cultures were encouraged to be different.
Standards for a humanitarian, rule-based order were set by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the UN’s Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. But in an age of amoral pragmatism, leaders’ violent policies and corresponding illiteracy about non-violence have made international law seem irrelevant.
When faced with life-threatening illnesses such as cancers, the sites of such disease must be identified before treatments can begin. In the same vein, cruelty as policy must be acknowledged before states and citizens can seek remedies, as in reviving respect for international law and conventions, and by demanding that politicians and diplomats speak truth to power.
Humanitarian alternatives to cruelty depend on a language of humanity, as in advocacy of non-violent, humane governance pursued by a non-destructive, life-enhancing politics. Such a redefinition of politics would include the responsibility to promote equality and preserve planet earth. Too much to ask?
Stuart Rees AM is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney & recipient of the Jerusalem (Al Quds) Peace Prize.
Comments
12 responses to “Cruelty as policy in Australia and elsewhere: a short list of 2020s’ victims”
It seems that the Trump Administration has gone out its way to execute prisoners in the dying days of the administration. (See Grayzone: https://thegrayzone.com/2021/01/05/inside-trumps-outgoing-federal-execution-spree/) It almost reflects how (as I understand it) the Nazi regime went out its way to implement the “final solution” towards the end of that regime.
It’s really hard to understand why the Trump Administration would go out its way to execute prisoners. Someone should investigate if this really was the case, and interview the people who implemented this policy. It would be good to understand their motive(s) for the accelerated execution.
Hello Stuart. I think you need to do some research on Navalny, then you might not be as impressed.
Professor Rees: thank you for this illuminating post.
It strikes me sentiments like:
‘Political cultures have fostered sadism, a pleasure in exercising control by hurting a person, an animal or the environment. Such conduct is justified by an alleged need to protect national security, and by pragmatism – do what you can get away with – in contexts that make cruelty toward the weak, such as asylum seekers, look like a mission.’
apply to more than just Home Affairs or indeed the Commonwealth.
Particularly if the words ‘protect national security’ were replaced by ‘protect public health’.
True they have different proponents, different media outlets and different levels of Government. And true who am I to judge the sincerity of either.
Nonetheless both are aspects of the multi-faceted ’emergency-give the experts power’ situation which seems to be running free.
Regards
Only yesterday Dutton compared cash and freedom in a cynical exercise in cruelty and authoritarianism.
It was absolutely disgusting what he said. Meanwhile he is prepared to spend millions locking up families with children on Christmas Island.
Relying on Western media accounts of events in China is a mug’s game, as Stuart Rees well knows, yet he has done so here.
Zhang Zhan is a ‘Christian’ with links to the Western Churches which support predatory capitalism. Freedom of religion is guaranteed in China – but Zhang Zhan does not want to associate with the indigenous Chinese Churches – but is rather motivated to bring down the Socialist System of China through various acts of low intensity terrorism probably ordered and encouraged by her Western paymasters.
ChinaAid, an anti-Chinese Evangelical lobby group which is also financed and awarded prices by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy, identifies Zhang Zhan as a ‘Christian lawyer’. That is of interest because Chinese authorities are concerned about U.S. financed underground Evangelical groups which defy the requirement to register as social organizations. ChinaChange, which is another ‘human rights’ outlet in Washington DC, also took note of Zhang Zhan.
Zhang Zhan arrived in Wuhan and started making videos uploaded onto the US-controlled YouTube rather than the Chinese-controlled ‘YouKu’.
As YouTube is ‘banned’ in China – these videos made by Zhang Zhan were only for Western consumption and had nothing to do with educating the Chinese population – as she alleged during her trial. Furthermore, the data she was broadcasting was scientifically ‘incorrect’ and liable to cause panic and alarm throughout the world. Of course, anti-Socialist (and racist) Western groups such as ‘Amnesty International’ – which says nothing about the fascism of ‘Donald Trump’ but which continuously criticises Socialist countries from a bourgeois moral perspective – obviously supports people like Zhang Zhan without question!
Zhang Zhan (张展), a lawyer who practiced in Shanghai, went to Wuhan in early February, determined to document the coronavirus outbreak in the city that was the epicenter of what would soon become a pandemic around the world. In the three months she stayed in the city, she made 122 posts on YouTube. It was not a coincidence that her first post was “My Claim for the Right of Free Speech.” Wuhan, where the first large outbreak of Covid-19 occurred, was put under lockdown on January 23. One wonders why a ‘former lawyer’ and ‘citizen journalist’ would go there despite official advice to not enter or leave the city.Zhang Zhan has long been active in speaking out about politics and the human rights situation in China. Pudong procuratorate indicted Zhang Zhan on September 15 and transfered her case to Pudong New District Court. The indictment accused Zhang Zhan of traveling to Wuhan on February 3, 2020 and that she “sent a large amount of false information” on WeChat, Twitter, and YouTube and “accepted interviews with overseas media Radio Free Asia and Epoch Times and maliciously stirred up the Wuhan epidemic situation,” exactly what the statute, ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ is designed to prevent.
A video published in late March by the Epoch Times, a right wing U.S. based paper associated with the anti-Chinese Falun Gong cult, gives a hint: “Dissident Protests ‘Animal-Like’ Treatment of Chinese Citizens”. In the video Zhang Zhan is standing at a light traffic barrier that blocks access to a quarantined housing block. She is ranting in a weepy voice at white clad guards and passerby. The Epoch Times translated the dialog:
Shortly before the man asked Zhang Zhan what she was doing she had knocked over the traffic barrier. Holding libertarian rants against pandemic measures and knocking over quarantine barrier while providing videos for anti-Chinese outlets is presumably ‘citizen journalism’.
Wuhan soon defeated the pandemic. But a few new infections in early May again raised alarm. The U.S. government-financed Radio Free Asia reported:
There was no resurgence of Covid-19 in Wuhan. Just a few, mostly asymptomatic cases were found during the city-wide testing. Shortly after her ‘reporting’ for Radio Free Asia the notorious grumbler Zhang Zhan was arrested. As this was not the first time she got herself into trouble she did not receive any clemency.
China did manage the news about the Covid-19 pandemic. It suppressed false reports. That is, according to the World Health Organization, what any government should do. A recent WHO Call to Action explains why: An infodemic is defined as a tsunami of information—some accurate, some not—that spreads alongside an epidemic. If it is not managed accordingly, an infodemic can have direct negative impacts on the health of populations and the public health response by undermining the trust in science and interventions. We are also seeing that infodemics hinder the cohesiveness of societies by increasing existing social inequities, stigma, gender disparity and generational rift.
As outlined in the Resolution on COVID-19 adopted by consensus at the 73rd World Health Assembly and the G20 Health Ministers’ Declaration at the Riyadh Summit, we need to provide populations with reliable and comprehensive information on COVID-19 and take measures to counter misinformation and disinformation.
The response to this infodemic demands the support, development, and application of efficient solutions that equip individuals and their communities with the knowledge and tools to promote accurate health information (upstream) and mitigate the harm that misinformation and disinformation causes (downstream).
Zhang Zhan did her best to feed the infodemic with rumors and false outrage. The Chinese government took appropriate measures against the ‘rebellious soul’. It also took the right measures to completely defeat the pandemic. But the CIA’s congregation of Washington based anti-Chinese ‘human rights’ organizations disagrees with those measures and it is jealous about China’s success. Thus the ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’ springs into action and the ‘western’ media dutifully follow its lead by lamenting about the fate of a ‘citizen journalist’ provocateur in China.
Meanwhile the U.S. government has criminalized investigative journalism by its continued torture of Julian Assange and arrested more than 100 journalists this year.
Stuart Rees’ voice is accompanied by the Mighty Wurlitzer.
Thanks for the details of Zhang Zhan’s activity which is described in our media as “reporting on the situation in Wuhan”.
Thanks, the standard of journalism & reporting on China is so poor among the mainstream media! You are right to say relying on Western media account is a “mug’s game”!
The government was warned over several years of the flaws in its Robodebt practices. Even if Robodebt was responsible for a fraction of the claimed deaths, it deserves inclusion in this list.
It was interesting to see the entire Dutch government resign recently for something quite comparable, yet far less harmful than Robodebt. They said they were not directly responsible, but took ‘political responsibility’ for the trouble and pain that was caused.
Here nothing has happened over Robodebt, not even a minister reprimanded, but hey, Morrison implemented the entire system so he has to be protected. The compliant press made sure it was out of the picture as soon as possible, and Morrison will soon be saying he doesn’t comment on anything or answer any question at all soon, unless it is to vilify Labor or the Chinese.
When cruelty as policy is so lucrative for the 1%, we can’t hope for a miracle metanoia of compassion and justice to occur in state perpetrators, nor can we wait because a policy of cruelty, as Stuart points out, imposes great suffering. .. not suffering as an abstract noun..
Stuart’s examples entail intense physical pain, terror, psychological anguish, forever grief, funerals, profound loss, unbearable helplessness borne by individuals.. and therein lies the consummate question!
How do we as individuals empower individual voters to care and act on that caring to ensure policies of humanity?
Here goes!
By our culture deriving, upholding and defending a set of secular ethics whose import can at least rival those of the Ten Commandments; by identifying simple and complex attitudinal and behavioural pathologies and by ensuring that such pathologies cannot be exercised either by individuals nor by role players nor by institutions, corporations nor bureaucracies.