Xenophobia debases us all

In the Book of Leviticus, the Day of Atonement is marked by the choosing of two goats. One is offered to God in sacrifice. The other, the scapegoat, is symbolically burdened with the sins of the community and driven into the wilderness.

Scapegoating is an ancient temptation. In situations where intense stress has complex causes, or causes that are difficult to face, it can provide some psychic relief via the illusion that the true source of evil has been identified. When the scapegoat is attacked, the sense of power that many people derive from socially sanctioned forms of sadism can offer a way to express anger and some compensation for feelings of fear, humiliation and powerlessness.

Participation in public scapegoating is always participation in collective cruelty. It is also always participation in the cultivation and legitimation of collective illusion. Every form of politics built around scapegoating is, without exception, a form of collective psychopathy. It is at the core of the illogic of fascism.

Sincere attraction to forms of politics constituted around the collective cruelty and the delusion of scapegoating are always an expression of personal weakness, moral debasement and a refusal to try to understand reality. We always, in the words of Abahlali baseMjondolo president S’bu Zikode , disgrace our own humanity when we diminish or vandalise that of others.

Today xenophobia, often entangled with racism and Islamophobia, is the primary passion propelling the far right into a central role on the political stage in many parts of the world. Some of the people who participate in that passion are wholly cynical, actively encouraging the misdirection of blame for social issues in order to safeguard their own interests or opportunistically build political projects that don’t have to reckon with the hard and complex work of building the forms of popular power and policy that can make things better for the majority. Others are believers invested in the pleasures of cruelty and the comforts of illusion.

Migration is not the cause of increasing hardship and decreasing life expectancy in the US as deaths of despair — suicide, overdose and alcohol abuse — increase and millions of people lack access to decent healthcare. More people are not going hungry in the UK and institutions like the National Health Service are not in decline as a result of migration. 

The right-wing forms of politics that mislead people on the causes of their suffering can only compound and extend that suffering. Wherever it becomes acceptable to dehumanise a group of people, dehumanisation itself becomes acceptable and can quickly be turned against other groups of people. The xenophobic riots in England and across Northern Ireland can only debase British society. Things are far worse in the US, where ICE, a heavily armed state paramilitary force, is seizing people from streets, schools and hospitals.

There is much in our own descent into xenophobia that is similar to what is happening elsewhere. There is nothing unusual about a figure as ugly as Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture Gayton McKenzie. The same constant fabrication about the scale of migration on social media, and the open and crude hostility to migrants, can be seen in many countries. This is also true of the ways in which our xenophobia is mediated through race and class, and a sense that we are a modern society menaced by barbarism across our borders.

As in so many countries, xenophobia in South Africa functions to distract from the real causes of our crises, to scapegoat vulnerable people, and to shield predatory and, in some cases, criminal elites who are responsible for social suffering and the decay and collapse of institutions.

But our xenophobia is different in a set of disturbing ways. Here it is often presented as a continuation of the national liberation struggle rather than a right-wing project. This is part of what has given xenophobia the kind of legitimacy in forms of media and politics assumed to be mainstream that it does not have in many other countries. Here one can be viciously xenophobic while holding a position in a trade union or political party that sees itself as progressive or as a columnist in a mainstream publication.

Talk radio — state and private — is often a grotesquerie of casual xenophobia. The mainstream media, the kind of media that wins awards and enjoys professional respect, is systemically, although of course not uniformly, xenophobic. There are generally no consequences for saying the kind of things that would be met with swift outrage if they were said about people with particular sexualities, genders or racial assignations.

The scale at which our police abuse and extort people they deem to be “foreign” is vastly worse than most other democracies. The impunity with which xenophobic mobs have robbed, beaten and killed people has some similarities to the periodic street violence of Hindu fascism in India but is unimaginable in most democracies.

The crudity of the speech used by people like McKenzie and organisations like Operation Dudula is common to right-wing politics around the world, but, outside of the US, it’s hard to think of any democracies that tolerate militarised forms of brazen vigilantism. There is no democracy in which small groups of people can brazenly prevent people from accessing clinics and hospitals, often with the support or complicity of the police, private security and hospital staff.

In most democracies, Operation Dudula would be seen as a fascist group, condemned by liberal opinion, directly confronted by the left and met with swift and effective police action if it tried to stop people from accessing hospitals or, as it has threatened, schools. Here it has mostly operated with impunity and has repeatedly been described with terms like “stakeholder” by politicians and as “activists”, a “grassroots group” or “civil society organisation” in the media. It is often treated as a legitimate or even commendable political actor in the media.

The alternative to xenophobia is always to develop a clear understanding of the real causes of social suffering and build a politics of solidarity that can relieve that suffering. We saw what this can look like in the US with the support for Bernie Sanders during his two campaigns in the Democratic primaries, and we’re seeing it again in New York with the success of Zohran Mamdani. We saw it in the UK with the huge enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn, during his 2015 campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party, and we are seeing it now with almost three-quarters of a million people having signed up for the new left party he is founding with Zarah Sultana.

Here there has been a systemic failure by the left to oppose xenophobia. The only mass-based organisation of the left that has done so is Abahlali baseMjondolo. But our media is so weak that when Abahlali baseMjondolo confronted and humiliated Operation Dudula in Johannesburg in July almost no reporting was able to accurately understand or report what had happened. 

Some reports presented the stand-off as if it was merely a conflict between two organisations with no sense of the moral and political issues at stake. Others, bewildered by the inevitable obfuscation of the idea of “civil society”, failed to understand the difference between professional NGOs and a movement of impoverished people and therefore missed the political significance of what happened. 

In much of the coverage, a white man on the right side of the police line was given far more space to speak than leaders of an organisation with many thousands of members. It was common for reporting to assume that migration was, as Operation Dudula claimed, a threat to the public healthcare system without noting that the real issues are austerity, mismanagement and massive corruption, some organised via criminal networks.

Xenophobia is always a stupid and ugly form of politics. It always deflects attention away from the real issues. Every excuse made for it is complicity. This is true everywhere and we need to stop granting ourselves an exception, stop using progressive language to describe a base and dangerous prejudice and stop thinking that we can claim to be democrats, or even just decent people, while presenting a fascist mob policing access to healthcare as a legitimate protagonist in our politics. 

Richard Pithouse is distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut, and professor at large at the University of the Western Cape.