by NAOMI KLEIN
Thank you so much Ann and everyone else at FODI [the Festival of Dangerous Ideas], my publisher Penguin and all the other amazing speakers who are part of this festival. And I want to thank you for your acknowledgement of country. Out of respect I’d also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, past and present, here in Sydney and the elders of the over 500 Aboriginal nations across Australia, where I’m told 5000 other people are also joining us via livestream.
When British colonisers first came to this land they treated it as if these nations did not exist: as if it were empty land, unsettled, terra nullius. These early settlers encountered people of course. It’s in all of the colonial records. But the humanity of those people, and the complex culture they had built, was not recognised under law. Humanity, nullified. That highly profitable refusal to see the full humanity of others, made possible by crude theories of superiority, is the foundational sin of your country, as it is of mine. In Canada, where I come from, we often signed treaties [with the indigenous peoples]. But we broke them with impunity so it’s really not all that different.
If our respective nations had truly learned from the violence of our past, done the hard work of change, then perhaps it would be adequate to acknowledge as we have today what our ancestors failed to do – that we are on indigenous lands – and then we could swiftly move on to other things. But unfortunately I fear that we have not learned from that foundational sin.
If anything, it feels like the categories of nullified humans is expanding all the time and that racism still plays a central enabling role. Indigenous peoples are still being disappeared into your country’s prisons – and my county’s – at shockingly high rates. Indigenous land rights are still being denied through various forms of legal trickery to make way for mining and drilling that will render those lands unrecognisable.
And, in the midst of the global refugee crisis, both of our governments, and many others, highly restrictive immigration policies are effectively nullifying the humanity of whole categories of people, denying them safe haven from wars in which our states are often directly complicit. Conflicts like the Syrian one that have been badly exacerbated by drought linked to climate change. And of course we also disproportionately complicit in that too.
We tell ourselves stories to make all of this seem okay, as our ancestors did. We tell ourselves, perhaps, that migrants from conflict zones are dangerous to us whether because they will steal our jobs or blow us up. But really we are part of a system that is doing the same thing, the same old thing, in denying the full humanity of others and with that humanity their full human rights, refusing to share our wealth, as ill-gotten as it may be.
This week all Canadians have been confronted with the unbearable truth: that Alyan Kurdi, the three year old boy whose tiny drowned body has become the tragic symbol of this moral crisis, should by all rights living safely in Vancouver right now. Instead he, his brother and his mother all died off the Turkish coast. Alyan’s aunt, who lives in Canada, had been trying to sponsor members of her family to come as refugees but the increasingly hostile bureaucratic process that my country has failed her and failed her family.
Desperate and with Canada unwelcoming, the family decided to trust their fates to that precarious plastic boat and those fake lifejackets. Our government has closed the door on so many others, accepting 10,000 fewer Syrian refugees than they had promised. But Canadians have never before been so directly confronted with visual evidence of the true costs of our government’s policy.
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