Ripping into the poor and powerless

With thanks to Aotearoa: a Wider Perspective

Shame is a tool of political suppresion.

by travellerev

Aotearoa: a Wider Perspective,

4 June, 2012

"As long as people have the strength to fight for human dignity in an age of austerity, a poorer, meaner society, a society built on shame, may yet be held at bay” -- Laurie Penny.

I have long argued that New Zealanders use the weapon of shame with incredible skill. It is used to beat single mums, people who are in need of aid of any kind and those who stand up against unfairness in the system.

What most Kiwi's don't seem to get is that is just how the system likes it.

The system needs talk show hosts who rip into beneficiaries who have the temerity to want a child, or a single mum who wants an education so she can better herself. The system needs Shame in order to stop people from asking questions, from saying no to the system when taxes are raised and benefits are cut.

Laura Penny makes an excellent and eloquent case for the use of what I might term Toxic shame and the use of it as a weapon of political suppression:

When someone starts talking about "political violence", you usually know what that means. It means nightsticks, kettling and riot cops massing in the streets like giant beetles. It means young men in face-rags throwing sticks and grown men on horses trampling them underfoot. We know how the story goes by now. People come out on the streets to protest against austerity. Police come out on the streets to stop them, armed with a variety of hastily concocted anti-dissent laws and the latest in crowd-control technology. Protesters get angry, police get violent, and people get hurt.

This week in Montreal, reporting on student demonstrations over tuition hikes much like those that shook Britain in 2010, I had a perfectly quotidian chat about the privatisation of education with a young man who happened to have lost an eye to a plastic bullet in a protest not two weeks before. This is the new normal wherever enforced austerity meets public dissent. Rinse off the blood and repeat.

There is, however, another kind of political violence, and it's much more insidious. It's shame. When single mother Shanene Thorpe was interviewed by BBC's Newsnight last week, she was expecting an honest conversation about coming cuts to housing benefit. Instead, interviewer Allegra Stratton challenged her "choice" not to live in her mother's spare room and, according to Thorpe, asked her whether she thought she should have aborted her daughter.

Like many other people on housing benefit, Thorpe is employed, but relies on the subsidy because her salary is too low to cope with soaring London rents. This wasn't mentioned in the interview. Instead, Thorpe was squeezed into a familiar caricature: the shameless benefit scrounger, explaining her decision to sponge off the state.

See: Laurie Penny: Shame has become our stick for beating the poor