editorial | Nathan Hollier

In this issue of Overland Angela Mitropoulos and
Brett Neilson quote George W. Bush, or whoever writes the material he attempts to recite, stating the “great divide in our time” is “not between religions or cultures, but between civilisation and barbarism”. This might be read as a statement of the liberal principle of tolerance: ‘religious and cultural difference is fine; only barbarism cannot be tolerated’. But given the willingness of Bush and his allies (as discussed in this issue by Geoff Boucher) to i) make pre-emptive attacks on and subsequently occupy sovereign nations (which coincidentally tend to have economically valuable resources), and ii) to trample on civil and human rights within their own nations, it seems clear that Bush’s statement actually represents an attempt to build legitimacy for autocracy and imperialism: ‘we are civilised; anyone who opposes us is a barbarian and must be destroyed’. Of course, the West has a long and noble tradition of justifying its brutal, sadistic oppression of the ‘dark’, ‘inscrutable’, ‘barbarous’ Other, on the grounds that white people and white society are inherently civilised. But in the context of a reinvigorated Anglo-American imperialism, made possible by the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001, conservative politicians and intellectuals have wheeled out the civilisation myth with renewed enthusiasm.
OOPut baldly, the civilisation myth states that ‘we’—white, Western, wealthy—have achieved our position of relative global dominance through the ‘fact’ that we are civilised; that is, ‘our’ wealth derives from our intellectual, artistic and humane sensibility, our very reluctance to shout people down or to attack, oppress and exploit the non-white, non-Western and non-wealthy. The logical extension of this view is that ‘we’ owe nothing to, and have nothing to learn from, ‘them’. Ironically, then, the civilisation myth serves to sustain Western ignorance and insularity and to legitimate the continuing ill-treatment of the non-Western. Devotees of the civilisation myth point to the poverty and political instability of large sections of the ‘third world’ as evidence of these people’s inherent lack of civilisation, their inability to attain or become worthy of wealth.
OOIt is much more accurate to suggest that ‘our’ wealth derives in large part from the ongoing Western or European exploitation of non-European resources. Australian society is just one obvious example. (The stories in this issue by Anne-marie Taplin, Maggie Joel, John Bingham and Robert Hodder remind us, in different ways, that Australians are not more ‘cultured’ beings than anyone else.) The logical extension of this alternative view is that ‘we’ owe a great debt to the non-Western world (including its members within Australia), and that ‘we’ have much to learn from ‘them’ before ‘we’ can consider ourselves truly civilised.
OOIt is no coincidence then that the rhetorical recourse to a supposed ‘clash of civilisations’ becomes louder as the behaviour of the ‘Axis of Anglos’ becomes more barbaric. And from this central irony, or hypocrisy, others ensue. As Stan Winford and Peter Noble write in this issue, the need to protect what Prime Minister Howard refers to as ‘our way of life’ is used to justify attacks on hard-won legal rights that are an important part of that way of life: “The fact that people have been interrogated” under new ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation, for example, “is only publicly known because Attorney-General Philip Ruddock happened to mention it as an aside in response to a journalist’s question on the ABC’s 7:30 Report”. Kenneth Davidson details how the supposed need to protect Western civilisation is used to justify Australia’s involvement in a war that puts us at increased risk of attack. As ‘we’ are thought to be innately civilised, there is then no need for a public education system. Damien Cahill outlines how the institution of public education is being progressively undermined by its New Right political opponents. Mitropoulos and Neilson write that the university, the great symbol of Western intellectual inquiry, has in recent years come under pressure to affirm the inherent rightness of the West, and its national and international social order. At the time of writing, two senior academics from the Deakin University Law School are publicly advocating the legalisation of torture. Brigid Magner finds that Australian authors who have gained international literary stardom through writing about their experiences in culturally diverse, overseas settings, are reclaimed as ‘dinky-di’ Aussies by insecure journalists. Those who criticise such conservative notions as the civilisation myth, who have some kind of concern for social justice, can be written off by its wealthy and powerful advocates as ‘elites’. Graham Willet examines this process here.
OOOne of the fearless ‘elite’ bashers, P.P. McGuinness, recently in the Australian accused Overland of having once been funded by the KGB. Needless to say, if there was a shred of evidence to this claim McGuinness, Peter Coleman, Peter Ryan and any number of other geriatric Cold War warriors would have been bleating this news from the nearest Murdoch media fog horn. Needless to say also, the Australian declined my kind invitation to correct this untruth in their letters pages.
OOIn a new section introducing the contribution of important intellectuals from around the world—in this case Ashis Nandy from India—Phillip Darby regrets that the recent Australian interest in India extends only to economic matters:

There was a time when Australia’s concern with India was not so narrowly directed—at least within universities and in more progressive sections of government and the community. For perhaps two decades after India’s independence the sub-continent was taken seriously. Jawaharlal Nehru commanded respect. The Indian model of political and economic change was held up as an alternative to that of China. The Colombo Plan was seen as a significant initiative.

OOKen Gelder notes that “something has happened to Australian fiction”. He thinks recent novels are “more inward-looking, more introspective, and more claustrophobic than Australian fiction has ever been”. Perhaps this narrowness and insularity is not surprising, given the overall political and cultural climate. Mabel Lee, on the other hand, whose translation of Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain was instrumental in that book’s winning of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature, remains optimistic about her work to promote understanding of Asian cultures in the Western world. She is interviewed in this issue by Vin D’Cruz.