Oikophobia and Globalisation
Everywhere gets nowhere
On 5 March 2024, Melbourne became a trending topic on X, and I knew why. It wasn’t about the ASEAN – Australia Special Summit (which is a bigger deal in Southeast Asia than Australia), but another black-on-white crime. A white girl, described as a 14-year-old autist named Dakota, was recorded to be kicked by a couple of girls, who have dark skin. One or two other girls with lighter skin colours stand by.
The video was allegedly recorded by one of the girls and was played on six o’clock news across Australia the evening before. Four have been arrested, three of them are also 14. On that day, the video became the talk of right-wing accounts in the Atlantic rim. On the other hand, while scrolling on the topic, I found two things: First, a black woman applauded the attackers. That would happen more, she wrote, white girls would get their due, so they better learn to fight.
That comment attracted bemusement because this adult woman is an African American while the teen assailants are Australians. They are likelier to be Africans instead of Aboriginal Australians, and Australia has no history of slavery. And what’s with the ‘due’? Whatever Dakota ever done to her?
Secondly, I found a group of white Australians discussing why they prefer to call their city Naarm instead of Melbourne. Melbourne is the name of a “boring old white man” (actually the British Prime Minister during the city’s foundation, who if you follow the lore of Victoria, is a warm father figure for the young Queen, played by Rufus Sewell). Naarm, on the other hand, is a warm, inclusive, and affirming community. One even went far saying that Naarm was the original name of the city before ‘white people taking it’.
When? What was Naarm like? Why did we never hear of this place? Is this person even Australian? Any Australian would know that Aboriginal Australians didn’t have any city. What’s now Melbourne was a hunting and gathering ground and meeting place, but there was never a city of Naarm.
But online, the ignorance of the African American woman and these Naarm Australians are encouraged. Maybe even offline when they hang out with people of the same persuasion. Melbourne is a place in the past, a white institution. Naarm is a place in the future when the bashing of a teenage girl is proper because she is white.
What I can say for certain is both the African American woman and the Naarm Australians hate their nationalities. She hates the USA, they hate Australia. And yet, they are respectively Americans and Australians. They live in cities dreamed about by most of the world. They will not dream about moving to Kingston, Jamaica, or Jakarta, Indonesia – let alone to rural Africa or Ireland.
What they want is a Google Gemini America and Australia. The city, whatever the name is, should have the same system as Minneapolis or Melbourne have right now, and even better. But it should be run by non-Europeans, non-Jews, and non-East Asians. It should consist mainly of dark-skinned people.
Thousands of cities worldwide fit those criteria and they cannot come close to Melbourne. Why? Colonialism is often blamed, but it’s just wrong. Colonialism makes Singapore but not Istanbul. Colonialism makes Lima but does not make Tokyo. If one defines colonialism strictly to the history of English imperialism, you had cities like Kumbi Saleh, Esfahan, and Karakorum which had nothing to do with the English.
This hatred for one own country is called oikophobia, fear of home, coined by the British philosopher Roger Scruton in 2004. To this day, this term is only written and spoken by Western conservatives, since Western liberals accept denial of one’s city (according to its European name) and country as democracy and self-expression. Western communists (these days the kids prefer to be identified as that than say, socialists) encourage oikophobia. A common refrain to anti-Israel protests is “Not only Israel must fall, America must fall too. Not only Palestine will be free, but Congo/Papua/Yemen will be free too.” (Hong Kong and Taiwan are hardly in thoughts these days. East Turkestan and Tibet are seldom invoked).
If that is an anarchy talk, notice that one has considered that a State of Palestine will be no different from a State of Israel or the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Nobody calls for the abolition of monarchy in Jordan or Qatar. In a world where borders are abolished, what is Ireland but an island, and what’s the difference between Barbados and Jamaica?
Oikophobia is defined as the extreme reaction to xenophobia. Because the conservatives hate foreigners and minorities, then the Left loves them. Many liberals easily accept refugees, Africans, and Muslims (in non-Islamic countries) on two grounds: To spite the conservatives and portray them as paranoid bigots, and to romanticise the outsiders as noble people, and certainly more colourful people.
Globalisation, hence, amplifies oikophobia. When the word was buzzing in the 1990s, it was a time of Pax Americana – free market and free people. Russians got their McDonald’s, Chinese got their international flights, Southeast Asians got their expats, and Africans got their employment visas. The anti-globalisation protests were nothing more than anti-Pax Americana. 9/11, to put it darkly, was the deadliest anti-globalisation action.
And now look where globalisation puts the West. Rapist refugees who cannot be deported, if not reported. Second and third-generation youth who hate their country of birth and put on the flags that their parents chose to leave behind. State officials who believe it’s inappropriate to celebrate the national day. Corporations who worry that their product is too white or too heteronormative.
Oikophobia is not a Western phenomenon. East Asia might have experienced it earlier, ironically during the rise of South Korea and China in the late 2000s and the early 2010s. Like in the West, the target of hatred isn’t foreigners but the status quo, represented by governments and families. Children are taken as nuisances while nihilism had become an online phenomenon a decade ago.
I’ve also detected oikophobia in Southeast Asia early this year, ironically as the region is rising economically, culturally, and politically. It’s not a place of decline, and yet the same signs. The bourgeois are convinced that they live in a fascist hell. The frustration is that their government does nothing about Gaza beyond sending aid. The talk about emigrating somewhere more progressive.
And it might cross into traditional xenophobia, but only against white people. The number of Europeans in Southeast Asia is growing, but still insignificant. Some Europeans in Southeast Asia share the Left politics, being journalists, activists, teachers, and researchers. And yet they are dismissed, at least online, as colonisers, white saviours, and of course, Karens (it’s telling that female and gay progressive hate white women more than white men).
Again, it’s all thanks to globalisation. Thirty years ago, we were in awe at a confident America and hoped to get its glimpse, through imported magazines, satellite dishes, and Internet cafés. Now the angry and self-hating America is at our fingertips. And what America feels the whole world will feel too, from your feelings about Dune 2 to your feelings about Taylor Swift.
The good news is oikophobia is overall a rich person’s disease. Everyone else struggles with food prices (also a global phenomenon), and the oikophobic bourgeois gets both. This poem, written by an Indian Brooklynite, perfectly captures all the despair of an established writer, down to his rage at a punk who doesn’t mask up. So much for the vaccines.