THE proposed anti-terror laws are not the start of a nightmare but they are a sudden, lurching descent.

They are no surprise. However no-one should mistake what they show about us and what they mean. They will be the end of the civil society we know and grew up with.

Frankly, they are a lot more frightening than any threat of terrorism.

As a national community, we are being invited to dehumanise a group of people. We all know this. It is old news. We have been told who to fear. We have ceased active compassion, recognition. They are becoming ciphers, symbols, evil forces, evil hordes, Dark Lords, allegedly functioning beyond ordinary human motivation, beyond morality, beyond ordinary comprehension.

We are being told now that it is wrong to even try to imagine them, in case this encourages them. We all know who they are. Terrorists, Saddam Hussein, suicide bombers, Islamists, Usama bin Laden, insurgents, Mullah Omar, al-Zarqawi, Muslim extremists, Amrozi, Jema’a Islamiya. They have Islam and violence in common.

Dehumanisation is this easy. Loss of democratic basics is this easy if government is prepared to use fear to legislate for the diminishing of rights and for secrecy.

The anti-terror laws will affect us all. You don’t have to have your teenage son disappear for this to seep into your home. You will become more intimately connected with that vanished and silenced teenager than you might ever have been otherwise. You may by then be afraid enough to be among the majority who have ceased to imagine him as complex and human, among those willing to have someone scare and torment him in secrecy and to deny him the rights you expect to have yourself.

More and more Australians will cease to recognise some Australians as human. We all know that this will affect all Muslim and Arab Australians, not just those who disappear for a time. Once exiled from our imagination, what are young Arab Australians to become? Put another way, if we continue to ratchet up the alienation young Arab and Muslim Australians feel, what will be the consequences? Where will they go to find themselves as Australians, their role in Australian history? Exile from the common imagination is the most terrible thing ever to happen to a group of human beings and has irreparable consequences. We should know that from history.

Do anything you can to wake people from this poisonous tragic fantasy. We are far enough gone that such awakening is deeply painful.

We are all responsible for each other. We are abrogating that responsibility in the most profound ways. We have abandoned reconciliation. We fear young people. We torment the most helpless. We deport our criminals to elsewhere.

Australia is unreconciled, at war with ourselves, suspicious of all and willing our own blindness, our own destruction.

We needn’t be this, or behave like this.

Want to do something? Write to your MP, repeatedly. NOW.

Dr Eva Sallis
Visiting Research Fellow
Department of English
University of Adelaide SA 5005
http://www.evasallis.com

President, Australians Against Racism Inc
http://www.australiansagainstracism.org