Isis, Hamas, Haiti and the Catholic church: on the use of 'death cults'
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Version 0 of 1. We’re not going to war with an army, but exorcising a “death cult”. It’s hard to say exactly what a death cult might be on the basis of the two scare-words alone (Could you draw a death cult? Could you describe its general characteristics?) but it’s a useful tag for Isis, which is why Tony Abbott likes it so much. It can be attached to any group which we need to be persuaded are our mortal enemies. A death cult – whatever it might be – sounds like something we would certainly want to be opposed to. Historically, the term death cult has been used to describe people – generally, but not always, black people – whose beliefs and practices are held to disqualify them from membership in the modern world. The Sunday Mail’s titillating 1928 feature about “black magic” Haitian death cults is part of this tradition of quasi-anthropological reportage. The trend was still visible in the Canberra Times report on a death cult in Papua New Guinea in 1971, and even in the widespread coverage of a Ugandan death cult in the early 2000s. Early in the 20th century it could be applied to “ignorant negros” in the American south practicing Voodoo, and even to the religious practices of Roman Catholics. None of these groups have much in common except that they’re not white Anglo-Saxon protestants (and as the Irish author Roddy Doyle wrote about the status of the Irish Catholics in Europe: “Say it loud. I’m black an’ I’m proud.”). “Death cult” here is a way of understanding the Other as primitive. It pulls together cultural difference and race with a particular view of history as an ascent from barbarism to civilisation. The death cultists are among those those who have been left behind, especially those who resist being “civilised”. In other circumstances, the idea of the death cult has been used to justify the political decision to make war on another nation or group, or to increase domestic security. In the 1940s, the Japanese were framed by the Australian media as a “queer death cult”. And security for the 2000 Sydney olympics was beefed up on the basis that Internet-enabled millennial death cults might launch attacks on the games. In recent decades, the “primitive” death cult and the “enemy” death cult have fused in descriptions of Islamic and Arab militancy. Young Palestinians fighting in the second Intifada were regularly described in this way. And in an advertisement that recently ran in the Guardian, Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel described Hamas as a death cult indistinguishable from the biblical Molochites, who practiced child sacrifice. Author David Pryce-Jones extended the death cult description to Islamists throughout the Arab World. The problem, apparently, is not the history of colonial, US and Israeli policy, but Arabs’ own backward beliefs: Islamic fanaticism and the need to wipe out perceived shame merge into a socio-religious frame of mind that sends these young men happily to their gruesome but devotional deaths. They have become priests of killing. On the far right, the death cult moniker is applied to Islam tout court. In 2010 a Tea Party leader described Islam as a “7th Century death cult coughed up by a psychotic pedophile”. Just last year, Kevin Carroll of the British Freedom Party was arrested for commenting on Facebook that Islam was a “devil-spawned death cult”. And Danny Nalliah of Rise Up Australia riffed on the Prime Minister’s comments, declaring that Islam as a whole was a death cult. This echo of the far right in Abbott’s comments, and the mainstream coverage of them, should be troubling. In recent weeks, many otherwise liberal media outlets have happily pushed the idea that the fight against radical Islam is a battle of good and evil – occasionally adding innovations of their own, with Isis now also branded a “rape cult” in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald. But whatever Isis are, they are not a primitive “cult”. They use modern weapons and communications technologies very capably – more capably than our allies in the Iraqi army. They are a product of history, a relevant part of which is the invasion Australia participated in a decade ago, that killed more Iraqis than Isis have so far, and permanently weakened the Iraqi state’s capacity to control its territory. Rather than thinking of them as some kind of elemental evil, a death cult from outside and beyond history, we should instead think of Isis as a material problem which it may not be Australia’s place to solve, and which intervention may make worse. |