ENFOQUE METODÓLOGICO

In her book: Eichmann in Jerusalem: The banality of evil, Hannah Arendt (1963/1994, p.39) has argued that, in Hitler’s Germany, Jews were gradually constructed as

“superfluous” people, as stateless “non-citizens”, and that this enabled the “good citizens” in the general population to either turn a “blind eye” to their fate or to project hatred onto them. This concept can be used to explain one of the most disturbing events in modern history, which occurred in November, 1938, in Germany. During the infamous Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), seventy-five hundred Jewish shop windows were broken, all synagogues went up in flames, and twenty thousand Jewish men were taken off to concentration camps. These events graphically illustrate the way that stereotypes, as representations and constructions of groups, are used unconsciously and ideologically to justify and legitimate existing power and social relations within a society (Jost & Banaji, 1994).

In his book Against paranoid nationalism, Hage (2003) has alerted us to the dangers inherent to a mute acceptance of discourses which position one category of people as less-than-human. Once the categories of “non-citizens” and “less-than-human” have been created, hatred can be safely projected onto all those who do not meet the ego-ideal endorsed by the nation state. In 1930s in Germany, all non-Aryans became subject to

being categorized in this way. The regime as Law, instead of protecting the people thus categorized (Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill and the physically disabled), was able to expel them from the body-politic, using the same logic as that applied when a gangrenous limb is surgically excised to ensure the survival of the individual

(Sichrovsky, 1988).

In the 1930s, William Cooper’s Aborigines’ Advancement League was a Christian organization based on the premise that, through education, Aborigines were capable of “uplift” to take their place alongside white Australians as citizens and British subjects. Cooper expressed outrage on several occasions that the children of any other nationality (citing Chinese and Japanese as examples) were immediately granted citizenship if they happened to be born in Australia, whereas Aboriginal people had no such status and were afforded no such protection by the British sovereign (King George). Cooper placed great emphasis on the contradiction between the Enlightenment values espoused by the

political and religious leaders of his day, and their actual behaviour towards indigenous people. An important event in Cooper’s tenure (as secretary of the League) was his much delayed Petition to the King, protesting about conditions of Australian Aborigines.

In the following segment of a letter detailing the appalling conditions in which

Aborigines were forced to live at Cummeragunga Mission, Cooper specifically compared the Australian Government’s treatment of Aboriginal people with Hitler’s treatment of the Jews in the period leading up to the Second World War.

What an indignity, to have these [educated blacks] branded as unfit to exercise the privileges of citizenship or to receive the benefits that accrue to the white person. If the white man wanted to think out an indignity for the man he has displaced, he could not do better than he has done by the natives. We feel that while we are all indignant over Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, we are getting the same treatment here and we would like this fact duly considered (William Cooper, cited in Attwood & Markus, 2004, pp. 110-111).

Cooper’s main complaint was that Aboriginal people, as non-citizens, were equivalent in status to the Jews of Europe, and were not allocated the same rights as other Australians. In the ironic phrasing of Paul Kelly’s popular song, Aboriginal people in Australia were given “special treatment”, which entailed State authorities dictating every aspect of their daily lives. The wages of Aboriginal workers were held “in trust”, they were not

permitted to move freely or live where they chose, it was illegal for Aborigines and whites to marry, and children of mixed heritage were routinely taken away to be raised in white institutions, where they were frequently subjected to physical and sexual abuse.

The psychodynamic theories of projection and projective identification, as developed by Melanie Klein, have become central to an understanding of phenomena which otherwise appears to be simply “mad”, or “monstrous”. The treatment of Aboriginal people is just one example of the way in which the defensive mechanisms of splitting and projection are used to force the Other into a position of what Bell (2004) called “embodied

superfluousness”. The release of “sickening” images22 from Abu Ghraib prison, showing

the extent of torture that has been inflicted on Iraqi detainees in 2004 and again in 2006 has only reinforced Freud’s pessimistic assertion that “man is a wolf to man” (Moore, 2006, The Age newspaper, February 16, p. 14). Other contemporary examples include the physical, sexual or mental abuse of State wards in homes established to protect them, the sexual abuse of children by clergy, or, as is all too common, the abuse of children by their own parent/s.