Assimilationist discourse fuses directly with the war on terror’s logic

Evidence

The call for assimilation and the idea that the nation must be a single, unified, homogeneous body is one that is highly compatible with a white-supremacist agenda and with the surveillance of Muslims. The Stasi commission, as Ezekiel observed, believed that the ‘concern with oneness prevails over all expression of difference, perceived as a threat.’ If Muslims are unassimilable, then the state is justified in keeping them out or limiting their citizenship rights. Monoculture readily collapses into anti-immigrant sentiment, as Sivanandan argues, referring to the British context. Assimilationist discourses are not only the basis to anti-immigrant positions but are eminently productive for the ‘war on terror.’ Multiculturalism, the argument goes, ‘has been instrumental in breeding terrorists by steeping them in their own culture and so alienating them from British society.’ The best anti-terrorist move, then, is to forcibly integrate citizens, a logic that conveniently ignores the role that injustice, military occupations, and racism play in producing terrorists. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 382

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the moral-panic dynamics from my recent reading, and the way ideological crusades are defensive against change (from the Armada book). — connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”