The far-right violence against foreigners in the United Kingdom these days strongly reminds me of a novel published in the 1980s: J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.
The far-right violence against foreigners in the United Kingdom these days strongly reminds me of a novel published in the 1980s: J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.
Coetzee, a South African novelist who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2003, describes in this slim volume exactly why and how this kind of violence erupts: because communities have been drip-fed lies and racial prejudices for a long time, until they form an image of strangers—in this novel, the barbarian nomadic tribes—that has very little to do anymore with reality.
The central character in Waiting for the Barbarians, which Philip Glass turned into an opera in 2005, is a middle-aged magistrate who has been running a sleepy border settlement of an unnamed Empire for years. Nothing ever happens in the village or in neighboring towns and villages. Everyone knows everyone. The subjects of the Empire and the barbarians living on the other side of the border, which is totally porous, have bent the rules so that everyone can go about their business without bothering others. The barbarians come to the village for food and medicine and go home afterward.
The magistrate must implement the rules of the Empire but tries to do this in a human, benign-ish way. When there is an occasional cattle raid, for example, he has a serious talk with those who did it. He hardly ever takes prisoners, and when he does, they are fed, kept clean, and often released early: “All my life I have believed in civilized behaviour.” In his view, conflicts do not benefit anyone and should be avoided. All is certainly not perfect, but it keeps the peace. The communities live more or less quietly side by side.
Then, one day, a delegation from the Empire’s secret service (the “Third Bureau”), led by Colonel Joll, visits the village. Joll, an unbending bureaucrat, is convinced that the nomad tribes are secretly preparing an attack on the Empire. He leads an expedition in search of rebels and radicals and comes back to the settlement with many suspects in chains. They are terrified. Suddenly, the prison is full. The inmates are humiliated, starved, and tortured. The magistrate tries to stop this (“These are fishermen, not rebels!”), but Colonel Joll sidelines him and continues to torture the barbarians until all “confess.”
After the colonel’s departure, the magistrate feeds the prisoners and sends most of them home. One of them is a nomad girl. He tends to her wounds, washes her feet, and sleeps with her. Eventually, he brings her all the way back to her tribe. When he returns home after the long journey, Joll is back. He has the magistrate charged with treason—“consorting with the enemy”—and throws him in the same jail where the barbarians are kept.
No one comes to the magistrate’s rescue. Many villagers have become as hysterical as the colonel, and the rest are lying low. By now, every barbarian seems like a terrorist to them. Any behavior that was once normal has become suspect. Eventually, of course, the village just destroys itself—without a single barbarian going on the attack. The settlement is a ruin. Most people have left, including the colonel and his people. The magistrate stays: He has nowhere to go. As a bitter winter cold sets in, he feels stupid, “like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.”
Although the novel was published in 1980, it has stark relevance for our times. Coetzee, whose Empire of course depicted South Africa under apartheid, shows how easy it is for a few zealots to turn communities that have long managed to live in peace against one another. All they need to do is to plant false, scary rumors about a particular group; embed them in a larger narrative about sovereignty, nationhood, and security; and then start pumping that narrative around. If citizens are scared enough, they are willing to believe it all. As Hermann Göring, the architect of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi police state, said when he was asked how he got the German people to accept Nazism: “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”
With this grim novel, Coetzee issued a strong, principled condemnation of South Africa’s apartheid regime, then still in full swing. (He immigrated to Australia later, in 2002.) Its relevance for today’s “far-right thuggery” in the U.K., as Prime Minister Keith Starmer put it last weekend, is no less clear. When far-right politicians fan the flames of racial and religious hatred for years, amplified by social media and newspapers calling migrants and asylum-seekers criminals, at some point Muslim communities and mosques will be targeted, asylum centers will be set ablaze, and Nazi salutes will be seen on the street.
In a democracy, words have consequences. A democracy is a political system that must ensure different communities in society do not get at one another’s throats. All communities have different interests. Therefore, there is always some friction between them. Because society is always changing, the balance between the communities is always changing, too. Democracy is meant to help them find a new balance, all the time. This applies to all levels of governance: local, provincial, national, European. Politics, journalism, and other institutions have a role to play in this system—a clear responsibility. Incitement, provocations, the spread of fake news, and the demonization of one community because of skin color or religion mean that they reject that responsibility. These are forms of democratic sabotage.
Coetzee’s message, voiced through the magistrate, is not a happy one. “To the last we will have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable.” Still, the magistrate plows on—what else can he do? He may be far from perfect, but he is a good man.
In the words of Coetzee, the real danger in society “always comes from within.” The U.K. is lucky to have a prime minister who seems to understand this.
The post The Novel That Explains Britain’s Far-Right Riots appeared first on Foreign Policy.
