Difference, deviation & dissent

HOT columnist, Sean O’ Shea, discusses some examples of the devaluing stereotypes which are applied to various groups in society, who are perceived as different, troublesome, or as deviating from perceived norms.  Drawing on examples from Nazi Germany as well as contemporary Britain, he emphasises the need for vigilance in the light of the stigmatisation and scapegoating of sections of the community.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana (1863-1952)

The lordly right of bestowing names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers…

 Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

The fact that we may be perceived by other people or agencies as being different, deficient, troublesome or deviating from perceived norms and expectations may have significant implications for our self-concept, our health, our employability and our freedom – particularly when they have power over us.

This process occurs systematically and paradoxically through the mediations of a wide range of familiar institutions, which ostensibly exist to care for us, protect us, educate us, heal us, inform us, entertain us and ensure our economic viability and civic wellbeing.

The institutional gaze

At the institutional level, aided by advances in information technology, we are subject to an increasing amount of surveillance, categorisation, performance management, interventions and ministrations. The worlds of work, health, education, welfare, consumer relations, finance, the media and politics are all domains in which we are routinely monitored, surveyed, ranked and objectified.

The French cultural historian, Michel Foucault (1926 –1984), demonstrates how these techniques and institutions of the modern state are not morally neutral aspects of a scientific methodology, advancing our knowledge of the social world in a disinterested quest for truth, efficiency or the promotion of human wellbeing (The Order of Things – An Archaeology of the Human Sciences 1966 & Discipline and Punish 1975). On the contrary, they act as instruments of control over our social identities and function as technologies of power and domination.

Dividing practices – the example of Nazi Germany           

Societies reveal a great deal about themselves by the groups which they target for treatment, demonisation or exclusion. Such groups are commonly identified by means of purposefully constructed labels or classification systems, which Foucault collectively refers to as “discursive formations” and “dividing practices” (Foucault 1965). These labels can be used to legitimise inequality, injustice, exploitation and oppression – and to deflect attention from systemic conflicts within society.

One of the most dramatic and comprehensive examples of dividing practices and their dehumanising and fatal consequences, was the stigmatisation,  persecution and ultimate genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

However, less well-known perhaps is that during this period an elaborate labelling system was devised, which gathered within its net many additional groups and individuals in German society, who, along with the Jews, were perceived as “other”, and had the misfortune to be identified as useless, subversive, alien or malignant elements within the body politic – and as a consequence suffered a fate similar to the Jews.

Badges, primarily inverted triangles of different colours, were produced and made compulsory wear for those designated as belonging to the stigmatised groups. Chosen categories of discrimination were based on race, class, health, disability, political or religious affiliation, moral conduct and sexual orientation.

For example an inverted red triangle was used to identify political dissidents, which included socialists, trade unionists, political prisoners, freemasons, anarchists – and many writers and artists. A green triangle was for criminals. A black triangle identified people who were judged asocial or workshy; this included vagrants, pacifists, conscription resisters, drug addicts and prostitutes. A large pink triangle designated homosexual men. Blue was for immigrants and foreign labourers. Purple was for Bible students, Jehovah’s Witnesses, pacifists or resistant members of religious organisations. Brown was for Roma gypsies – and the familiar six-pointed, yellow Star of David was reserved for the Jews.

Concentration camps

The Nazis constructed over 20,000 concentration camps between 1936 and 1945 to handle the masses of people identified and arrested as alleged subversives and ‘undesirables’. Some of these camps were ostensibly for re-education in accordance with Nazi values – and others were transitional spaces, adjacent to local factories, confinement in which – through long hours of slave labour, neglect, and casual violence – led to the ‘accidental’ deaths of many of the inmates. Others were death camps specifically designed for the systematic extermination of ‘undesirables’.

Although commonly associated with Nazi Germany – and uniquely developed and refined therein –concentration camps had been devised in the late nineteenth century and were used by the Spanish in response to the Cuban insurgency in 1895, by the British in South Africa during the Boer War 1899-1902 and by Stalin in 1929, for the internment of designated counter-revolutionaries.

Useless eaters – eugenics

In a nation that was becoming increasingly dedicated to the pursuit of power, efficiency and territorial aggrandisement, the perceived crime of uselessness became a focus of special concern.

The Nazis viewed the mentally ill and people with disabilities as a particular drain on scarce national resources and a threat to the gene pool. Legislation was enacted in Germany in the 1930s requiring the identification and registration of all such persons – also referred to as “useless eaters”– as a prelude to their annihilation.

The dream of making society more efficient by cleansing it of unfit genetic attributes didn’t originate in Germany. It was derived from the biological determinist ideas of the English scientist, polymath and eugenicist, Francis Galton (1822 -1911), who in an attempt to popularise his ideas wrote a novel entitled Kantsaywhere, depicting a eugenic utopia geared to the breeding of fitter, more intelligent human beings. These ideas were later developed and disseminated through the American eugenicist movement in the early twentieth century, leading to the promotion of negative eugenics to prevent those thought to be unsuitable from having children and legitimising policies of racial hygiene.

A USA poster (see above) dated 1926 recommended the ‘removal’ of people who were viewed as mentally ill, had learning difficulties or were seen as genetically defective – and advocated the selective breeding of the fittest.

The eugenicists classified people according to race, class, and physical health. They believed in the genetic superiority of Nordic, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples. They advocated the segregation and enforced sterilisation of the poor, disabled and the “immoral”. Euthanasia was another strategy favourably considered by some eugenicists, but it was felt that American public opinion was not ready for this radical intervention (Carnegie Institute report, 1911).

Hitler admired and was strongly influenced by the American eugenicist movement. However, what distinguished him and his cadre of military, medical, intellectual and scientific supporters was their collective willingness to move from theory to practice – and without moral scruples or the constraints of democratic accountability – to attempt to fully implement the eugenicist vision.

While there were some examples of courageous resistance to this regime, it was backed actively or passively by a wide range of individuals and organisations within mainstream German society, such as the industrial corporations, the Catholic Church and many of those involved in the professions – including university professors, who dutifully paid obeisance to the Third Reich.

Back to the right – brave new Britain

Caution must be exercised in drawing parallels between the cultural ethos of pre-Second World War Germany and contemporary society, but there are common themes.

The last days of the Weimer Republic were characterised by economic crises, high unemployment, programmes of austerity, the fragmentation of the left, a deep disillusionment with politics, politicians and parliamentary democracy and a lurch towards authoritarianism. There was also a pronounced polarisation of society into groups perceived as insiders and outsiders – and race became an increasingly important criterion for defining identity.

With advances in science and technology, issues related to, for example, surveillance, data control and the eugenics debate are even more pertinent now than they were during the period of the Third Reich. Furthermore, some of the dividing practices implemented in present day neoliberal Britain are worryingly reminiscent of those applied in Nazi Germany – and some of the targets for denigration and state intervention are also eerily familiar.

For example, a social category which has become common parlance in political and media discourse is that of ‘hardworking families’ or, more recently, ‘hardworking people’.

Membership of this group can presumably be differentiated from all those other, imputedly, non-hardworking people, who are allocated a role as outsiders in a socially constructed twilight zone.

This latter group is a protean constituency frequently blamed for society’s ills and commonly includes benefit scroungers, feckless or riotous youth, asylum seekers, ethnic minorities, travellers, chavs and many other marginalised sections of the community who, for one reason or another are, from the State’s point of view, seen as problematic – for a more comprehensive list you need only refer to the tabloids.

The more these dehumanising labels and divisions are repeated and enshrined in public discourse, policies and practices, the more intense becomes the rhetoric which seeks to promote a contrasting idealised image of an integrated community through the employment of such fatuous political slogans as ‘one nation’, the ‘big society’ and ‘we are all in this together’.

By such manipulation and distortion at the symbolic level, an imaginary unity is superimposed on an increasingly fragmented, segregated, inequitous and conflict-ridden society.

As the economic crisis deepens, so the stigmatising of select groups intensifies in spite of formal legislation prohibiting such discrimination. This increases the vulnerability of those who are considered unproductive, unemployed, ill, old, disabled, recalcitrant or otherwise potentially burdensome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For example, in October 2011, over 90 traveller families were evicted from the Dale Farm site in Essex, UK – one of the largest traveller sites in Europe – which they had occupied since the sixties.  The estate was divided into two sections; the front part (about 45 plots) had planning permission, while the back part, previously a scrap yard, had been refused planning permission by the local council, despite numerous applications and appeals. Most plots were owned by travellers of Irish heritage, although some Romani families also owned plots.

Civil rights organisations as well as some members of the local community expressed support for the travellers. However, there was also a reactionary consensus which enthusiastically endorsed their eviction. The mindset of this latter group was exemplified by the following comment posted on the Dale Farm Solidarity Website:

The time has come for a final reckoning with this scum [gypsies/Irish travellers] and their bedfellows, the *chavs. We will not allow our country to be held to ransom by these parasites and their idiotic supporters. It is up to every decent, law abiding, moral citizen to remove this pestilence and filth from our land…

Hard economic times do not necessarily lead to any resurgence of leftist sympathies in the body politic. Indeed, in an age of austerity, it is the lurch to the right that has become the more discernible tendency in the UK and across Europe. UKIP looks forward to further gains in the impending European elections. Also witness the advance of the neo fascist Golden Dawn movement in Greece and the historic gains by Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front party in the 2011 local elections in France, which placed the party just trailing Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP.

This trend, in the UK at least, is aided and abetted by the disarray and fragmentation of the left, the visionary and philosophical  impoverishment of the Labour Party with its reliance on focus groups for policy development – and the rush to a putative centre ground by all the main parties.

In such a context, there is a need for continuing vigilance if we are to counteract individual and institutional attempts to treat parts of the population as less than human – and to further erode our hard-won, albeit limited, freedoms and rights.

SOS Oct 2013

• Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, Owen Jones 2011
• An accessible introductory paper by Stephen Madigan summarising the ideas of the late Michel Foucault is available free to read online here.

 

 

 

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