Violent Ignorance

Confronting Racism and Migration Control

Hannah Jones

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786998590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

An elected politician is assassinated in the street by a terrorist associated with extreme political groups, and the national response is to encourage picnics. Thousands of people are held in prison-like conditions without judicial oversight or any time-limit on their sentence. An attempt to re-assert national sovereignty and borders leads thousands of citizens to register for dual citizenship with other countries, some overcoming family associations with genocide in their second country of nationality to do so. This is life in the UK today. How then are things still continuing as 'normal'? How can we confront these phenomena and why do we so often refuse to? What are the practices that help us to accommodate the unconscionable? How might we contend with the horrors that meet us each day, rather than becoming desensitized to them? Violent Ignorance sets out to examine these questions through an understanding of how the past persists in the present, how trauma is silenced or reappears, and how we might reimagine identity and connection in ways that counter - rather than ignore - historic violence. In particular Hannah Jones shows how border controls and enforcement, and its corollary, racism and violence, have shifted over time. Drawing on thinkers from John Berger to Ben Okri, from Audre Lorde to Susan Sontag, the book questions what it means to belong, and discusses how hierarchies of belonging are revealed by what we can see, and what we can ignore.

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More in common

[T]he strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil.

– HANNAH ARENDT, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM¹

Breaking point

It is a warm June day. I’m hurrying, late as usual. I’ve a train to catch to London, an evening event to attend for work, the day disappeared quickly. I hustle through the underpass from the bus stop to the train station, barely acknowledging the figure hunched in a sleeping bag asking ‘spareanychangeplease’ as I shrug apologetically and navigate other passers-by passing by, while checking emails and what platform the train will leave from, on my phone. A text message pings onto the screen from a friend: ‘Just heard abt the mp. Bleugh.’

When I search back through my text messages now, thinking about writing this, I see that I replied within a minute. But when I got her text, I had no idea what had happened. What MP? ‘Just heard about the MP,’ followed by an indication of resigned disgust, could mean anything, a week before the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Someone had said or done something offensive, stupid? I opened a news browser. A pro-Remain MP had been murdered.

My response, within a minute? ‘oh shit’.

I kept going and got on the train. The rest of the journey, I read more. The sign that morning, released by Nigel Farage MEP for the Leave campaign: ‘BREAKING POINT’, emblazoned across an image of a snaking line of men, apparently on their way into Europe. A promise to ‘take back control’, and the image only circulating widely because of the breathlessly outraged coverage of it in the press, Farage’s grinning face, adoring the outrage, posed in front of the picture of hopeless, rejected people. Two polar opposite folk devils – the destitute migrants and the rabble-rousing Farage – the latter knowingly revelling in his notoriety and the ways it will help his message reverberate.

The details of the murder as they drip in – the words from that poster – seem too apt. A very bad joke. This, this is the breaking point. Not inevitable, but not unexpected. The point when the weight of things makes them crack.

An MP has been shot. Stabbed. Dead. Her attacker shouted, ‘[P]ut Britain first.’ If this isn’t a crisis, what is? What happens when politics becomes polarized like this? What happens next after democratic representatives are murdered?

At that moment, I don’t want to know. Or rather, I don’t want to start thinking it through because it feels like madness and fear. I keep working on the book we’re writing that starts from another billboard on the side of an advertising van, when the home secretary – who then became prime minister – asked people, ‘In the UK illegally? GO HOME OR FACE ARREST.’² ‘Go home,’ the echo of 1970s playground taunts we had thought confined to the past, but now splashed across government signage. I have said this last thing countless times now, each time feeling that stating this is redundant, but then, it must need restating, or else how could this have come to pass?

That Go Home van, from 2013, also worked like Farage’s Breaking Point provocation, using media and social media outrage to circulate way beyond the audience that would have seen it had the van simply gone about its business on its designated route. In 2013, it seemed the language itself produced the outrage that pushed the image into every newspaper and hundreds of social media posts, which makes it resound three, four, five years later, every time an immigration scandal hits the government. Farage’s face was not pictured grinning in front of the ‘GO HOME’ sign, but he and fear of his party were widely credited as the motivation for it. It signalled the beginning of the UK government’s overt ‘hostile environment’ for migrants which would seep into every aspect of life, as this book details.

As I begin to write this book, it is two years on from that day. I keep going back to think about the murder of Jo Cox. I keep wondering how it can be that the slaughter of an MP which seemed like such a significant turning point that it might wake people up to how divided political discourse had become, how unthinkable the situation was, seems to have simply faded away. I have fixated on the ways she has been memorialized, picked over the pieces of her life as they are laid out in her widower’s writing and campaigns for her remembrance, and the ways her friends and family have tried to preserve her ‘message’ in national campaigns for togetherness, like a ‘Great Get Together’ of a national picnic, and in supporting more women to become politicians. I have understood the urge to remember Cox for her life and not for the way she died. But I can’t shake the feeling that as a society, we should be taking more time over understanding and facing up to the manner in which she died, how it could happen, and what it says about the world we are living in right now. Why haven’t we?³

That question is part of what drives this book. The need to understand not just what happened to Jo Cox, and to a country when a political representative was assassinated for stark politically motivated reasons, but also to understand the widespread turning away from thinking about, let alone trying to come to terms with, such an event.

In the pages that follow, I set out to ask why we turn away from such difficult moments, what it would mean to confront them, and how we could go on if we did face up to knowledge about such painful and complicated events. This is an attempt to recognize how hard it is to live with the pain of discomfort and worry, but also a suggestion that by ignoring or turning a blind eye to painful questions, we do not avoid their consequences. Instead, we live with the difficulty in everyday, multiple, and sometimes equally painful ways.

In the rest of this chapter, I consider further the death of Jo Cox, which felt like a ‘breaking point’, and why it turned out not to be a breaking point at all, and how we might use the perspective of violent ignorance to consider what can happen when seeking comfort from disturbing events is prioritized over dealing with their origins. The reaction to Cox’s death was deeply felt – but the feelings that were amplified were about an attack on a ‘defenceless’ wife and mother, rather than an attack on a democratically elected representative. The grief for the loss of Cox in her personal and domestic role channelled attention away from seeing this as an attack precisely on her (and others’) moves outside of the domestic, an attack on a woman holding political power, and using that power to defend refugees and transnational links.

This refusal to see Cox as a politician in the context of her death turned her murder into a meaningless and sad event, rather than a too-meaningful part of a struggle over political questions of race, nation and gender. To understand why that happened, I think we have to consider what was ignored and why. We ignore things all the time, in order to function – for example, in the opening to this chapter, I describe manoeuvring around people who are living in destitution, without much thought, an everyday experience for many people. Indeed, there is an academic field that studies what we don’t know and what we refuse to know – it’s called ‘ignorance studies’ or sometimes ‘agnotology’. What do (or don’t) they think about in ignorance studies?

Ignorance, thoughtlessness, responsibility

The ‘ignorance’ in ‘ignorance studies’ is not about stupidity. Though it sounds like a paradox, ignorance can be knowing; it can mean the deliberate ‘ignoring’ of knowledge that could easily be acquired.⁴ Ignorance can also mean the ‘thoughtlessness’ referred to in the epigraph to this chapter. Thoughtlessness might seem like the opposite of a deliberate act, but it is an act of omission to refuse to think. Very often, this is an act encouraged by structural and political powers. It is also a way to avoid unpleasant feelings of discomfort, guilt, fear or shame.

The epigraph for this chapter is taken from the analysis of the trial of a senior Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, by German Jewish social theorist Hannah Arendt.⁵ This is the work in which Arendt coined the now famous phrase, ‘the banality of evil’, to show that considering Eichmann an out-of-the-ordinary monster missed the point. He was an ordinary – banal – man who made ordinary – banal – choices, within the extraordinary situation of Nazi Germany. To consider him an exception allows the rest of us to exempt ourselves, to imagine ‘I would never act like that’. What Arendt demonstrated was that to understand, and hopefully to avoid, similar atrocities, one has to recognize that the evil seen to be embodied in Eichmann is something which stems from everyday and ordinary practices. To reject Eichmann as outside the norm, as non-human, is an easy way to reject a proper analysis of why the Holocaust happened and how it could happen.

Arendt’s analysis of the Eichmann trial turns on questions of responsibility, but also on questions of ‘thinking’. She uses the term ‘thinking’ to describe the ability to reflect – to have an ongoing ‘dialogue between me and myself’.⁶ Someone in this kind of dialogue would realize they have to literally live with themselves. In Arendt’s view, most people given the choice would avoid living with a murderer or an instigator of terrible crimes. Most of the time, the decision about what is a terrible crime comes from society – if you are caught committing a crime, you will be punished by society’s institutions. However, in the situation of Nazi Germany, society’s institutions insisted that citizens enact atrocities. Therefore, those without the ability to ‘think’ – to reflect on an internal ethics – would, simply by obeying the law, become Nazis. Without a conscience – ‘thinking’ – they did not resist the requirements of the regime. As Eichmann claimed, many believed they were behaving morally by following the law of the land in sending millions of people to death camps. This is important when considering the various criticisms of how Arendt wrote of Eichmann.⁷ Many centred on whether Eichmann should be considered a monster. Arendt’s argument was not that Eichmann should be forgiven – she made it clear that she wished him to be hanged for his crimes – but that he was not an exceptional person.

This is where ‘thoughtlessness’ comes in. Arendt suggested it was not necessarily a conscious intention to commit evil that motivated Eichmann – indeed, in his testimony he expressed his horror at seeing some of the crimes he had ordered being carried out in Poland, where he saw naked Jews told to enter mobile gas vans where they were killed, followed by

the most horrible sight I had thus far seen in my life … the corpses were thrown out, as though they were still alive … They were hurled into the ditch, and I can still see a civilian extracting the teeth with tooth pliers.⁸

As he makes these visits, he remarks to a local SS Commander:

Well, it is horrible what is being done around here … young people are being made into sadists. How can one do that? Simply bang away at women and children? That is impossible. Our people will go mad or become insane, our own people.⁹

Eichmann expresses this horror without recognizing his responsibility, as the head of the Nazi ‘Department for Jewish Affairs’. The reason he can do so is, according to Arendt, his ‘thoughtlessness’, his lack of capacity for ‘thinking’. Arendt makes clear she does not mean ‘thinking’ as something that requires particular intellectual capabilities or education (i.e. she is not saying ‘stupid/uneducated people don’t think and are irresponsible’). For Arendt, Eichmann simply did not have a conscience, an ability to reflect on what he had done.

However, I would suggest there can be an element of choosing not to ‘think’ in this manner. He knew these were his orders. He refused to contemplate the consequences. We can see this by stepping away from this extreme example, to more banal cases of the shock of being confronted with the violent consequences of one’s own actions. Look, for instance, at Conservative MP, Heidi Allen, wiping away tears and unable to speak in Parliament on hearing of the destitution and desperation of fellow MP Frank Field’s constituents living without food or hope.¹⁰ Allen had voted consistently to reduce financial support for people in need, including for housing costs, and for disabled people.¹¹ That did not stop her heartfelt demonstration of empathy for Field’s constituents – despite the fact that reflection on how their situation might have arisen could have led to an understanding that it was directly linked to her own (and others’) political decisions.

The philosopher Charles W Mills writes of ‘white ignorance’ and how throughout the history of Western philosophy there has been a persistent emphasis on (wealthy) white men as the norm, particularly in conceptions of justice.¹² He gives the example of how classical philosophies of fundamental rights, such as those put forward by seventeenth-century thinker John Locke and eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, have been used in political philosophy in a way that only applies to people designated as white, and not to others, creating ‘a universe divided between persons and racial subpersons, Untermenschen, who may variously be black, red, brown, yellow – slaves, aborigines, colonial populations – but who are collectively appropriately known as “subject races”’.¹³ In this, those in power not only reject the rights of ‘others’ to fundamental rights, but reject knowledge of what life is like on the other side of this ‘universe’. To know the effects of white supremacy – colonial domination, occupation, extermination, exploitation and slavery – would be to question the very basis of the ‘good life’ lived by those benefitting from it. Ignorance here is powerful and important because to know and to ‘think’ on these terms would be a painful and potentially revolutionary experience.

Relatedly, feminist scholar Gloria Wekker describes ‘White Innocence’ as a position in which a national culture (in her case, writing in the context of the Netherlands) imagines itself as small, kind and in need of protection, while erasing memories of being an aggressor in historical forms of oppression; ‘innocence, not knowing, being one of the few viable stances that presents itself when the loss of empire is not worked through, but simply forgotten’.¹⁴ Like Mills’s use of ‘ignorance’, Wekker does not intend her term to be a get-out clause for those who practise it. Rather, in the context of the Netherlands, a former colonial power but which now sees itself as a bastion of inclusion and equality, being forced to confront the knowledge of former and – especially – ongoing domination and oppression is painful because it cuts to the heart of a national belief in being a ‘good’ nation in terms of valuing equality. Rather than b...