All reasonable people abhor violence, in all its forms. As a society, we rightly resile from it. But we are no good at examining it, and we certainly aren’t practised at dealing with it. We see some people’s anger and grievance as legitimate and wave away their rhetoric as righteous emotional outbursts, and others as illegitimate and as causing the problem. If you weigh perpetrators of political violence only by their politics, then it is not the impact to people you prioritise, but the score.
Perhaps one of the biggest differences is when one act speaks for a whole movement, but if an equally heinous act is carried out by a person with politics of a different type, it’s an individual act, with regrettable consequences.
It’s common to see people cherry-pick the facts that suit the case they are making, taking comments out of context to prove their case, while wiping their own slate clean. We know Charlie Kirk’s name, but not Melissa Hortman’s.
Make a dehumanising joke about someone you don’t like and they should just “get over it”, but if the subject represents your side, it’s a capital offence. The outrage, and the response, is rarely applied equally.
In terms of political debate, we weigh the calling out of the increasing dehumanisation and vilification of members of our society as equal to the dehumisation and villification itself, and then decry an end to civility. Meanwhile, ASIO reports that the median age that children first appear on its radar is 15; 85 per cent of them are boys, with radicalisation now occurring within weeks, mostly online.
In its submission to the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security inquiry into the nature and drivers of radicalisation in Australia, which was established before Monday, ASIO reported “drivers of radicalisation into violent extremism are also now numerous and diverse. Complicated ideologies and grievances, technology, and world events are interacting with and compounding each other – and can be internalised by an individual to explain their own grievances and circumstances”.
“Additionally, since the Covid-19 pandemic, ASIO has also observed increasing anti-authority beliefs, lower trust in institutions, spikes in societal and political polarisation, non-peaceful debate and protest, intolerance, and the normalisation of provocative and inflammatory behaviours. As a result, the environment is more conducive to an increase in acts of violence,” it said.
Most people in Australia will have felt this shift. And the answer requires more than repeated, if well-meaning, calls to take the “temperature down”.
We need to examine what’s fuelling the fire, with clear, non-partisan eyes. That also means challenging who we allow to be dehumanised, and how. Not by what best suits a particular cause, but all of the permissiveness we have accepted into the mainstream, almost without question.
And it needs to happen now. Alarm bells are already blaring about what the future of technology will exploit, compounding what we’ve already lost control of. That’s not a partisan issue, it’s a fact. One that will impact all of us, whether we believe in it, or not.
Amy Remeikis is a contributing editor for The New Daily and chief political analyst for The Australia Institute
This piece was first published in The New Daily. Read the original piece here