SOCIETY
John Safran
Depends What You Mean by Extremist: Going Rogue with Australian Deplorables
Hamish Hamilton, $32.99
Reclaim Australia are on the television news protesting against Islam. Many of them have Aussie flag scarves covering their faces. In front of them is a line of police. On the other side of it are the counter-protesters. Many of them wear black scarves covering their faces. The two sets of scarf wearers are desperately trying to get their hands on each other. End of report.
To the well-meaning liberal, this all seems ritualised and pointless, but thankfully John Safran has spent months with the sectaries in the trenches, and these are his despatches. His general method is familiar: he gets up close to all kinds of "extremist": right-wing, Islamophobe, jihadist, anarchist, and plays off his not-quite-ingenuous persona to loosen them up.
The subjects know in their bones he is going to make them look a bit ridiculous, but he is so non-confrontational that they open up like flowers, and the amusing contradictions pour forth.
Take Musa Cerantonio, for example, Islamic convert and jihadist preacher. Safran goes to visit him in Footscray, well before the "tinny terrorist" incident, and finds the lounge room full of owl figurines. "Musa considers these to be graven images, but it's his mother's house so what's he going to do? She agreed to take down the Last Supper painting but was immovable on the owls." The homegrown jihadist then starts quoting Monty Python and makes an adolescent prank call to CityLink, setting the tone for much of the book.
Safran seems to have an inexhaustible supply of characters whose apparent awfulness is offset by the oddness of their path to extremism, their tolerance of him personally, or their utter ridiculousness.
At one point he tangles with Jim Saleam, veteran fascist and head of the ludicrously bathetic Australia First Party. Sent away with a flea in his ear, he returns later, is apparently not recognised and a completely surreal conversation ensues where Saleam tells John Safran why he doesn't like John Safran because "he perceives me as something out of a Nazi comedy routine".
Any menace the right do offer is neutered by our knowledge that their ritualised and pointless caterwaulings are a pale echo of the dog whistling coming from the very top of the political food chain. No one in this book is even half as frightening as Peter Dutton.
The right-wing anti-Islamic "crusade" is not as straightforwardly racist as one might imagine. There is, for example, Rebecca: half-Jewish, who after a disastrous relationship with an Indian Muslim, has ended up (literally) on the bus with the United Patriotic Front. But after a while, and especially after Safran goes on a bender with the "patriots" after an anti-mosque rally in Bendigo, it is all rather enervating, and much of it, especially when Jim Saleam pops up, feels like a Bizarro version of David Greason's I was a Teenage Fascist.
The socialists and anarchists of No Room For Racism, on the other hand, aren't charmed by him at all, and bluntly tell him that all he does is humanise the extreme right. He is sensitive to this quite reasonable accusation, but naturally far more sensitive to the fact that they seem to regard anti-Semitic abuse and violence as "interpersonal" or "non-structural" violence. "I tell him the socialists should stop using the swastika with the red line struck through it. Someone might get the idea that they're against punching and shooting Jews."
John Safran's un-ironic personal feelings of radicalisation, and realisations about the way his own family and community fit into the mosaic, make him somewhat incoherent, unsure how to finish the book, and even less sure that humour is useful. But he needn't worry.
The scene where the Jewish community, for security reasons, hold their Chanukah event at Caulfield Racecourse, is scarifyingly hilarious, and radical, and coherent. In this book, (to misquote Brecht), he who laughs has heard the terrible news a hundred times over.