Against Fascism, War and the Lie of 'Peace through Strength'

 

Fascism as Commodity

‘Peace through strength’ =

   ‘make a deal for peace’ =

profit margins 

of a strong peace

of(f) the map

re-mapping

peace for strong men

peace-brokers 

& breakers,

for endgame cartographers

for terraformers

for laws unto selves

for holy justified sentences

for death sentences

for warrior-hero complexes

& reconditioned 

existentialism

for ordnance dumped

on ordnance surveys

(private satellite images

       & military contracts)

regime change to change regimes

to regime change in the grammar

of greatness 

& each bird, reptile, insect

killed in the earth-burst...

& humans, 

yes, 

there are humans

killed too, existential afterthoughts

of savings

vs. costs. [= = = = = = = = = = = =]

John Kinsella

On the State of Things — An Anarchist-Pacifist Statement for a Leaderless World

John Kinsella

As each of us, no matter where we are in the world or what circumstances we live under, tries to come to grips with a collapsing biosphere and human injustice towards fellow humans and towards ‘nature’, we are confronted with the issues of people making decisions for themselves or on ‘our behalf’ that frequently offend or distress us, that go against all we believe in. Many people are suffering obvious and horrendous abuse and deprivation, are in conflict zones, suffering state-driven, social or domestic violence, suffering from criminal (for self-gain) exploitation, experiencing marginalisation or bigotry from people or institutions in the majority or far more empowered than themselves, or live in poverty or reduced circumstances. 

The obviousness of all this is not an excuse to dismiss as ‘realpolitik’ or with ‘it was always thus’ stock sayings. The wrongs are not addressed by a fatalism of ‘the human condition’. Each of us might also have our ideas or theories about how to address wrongs on micro and macro levels, and many of us are trying or will try to live lives that reduce our corrosive impact of presence on others and on the biosphere. It goes without saying that some people will try to exploit for self-gain, or even for their own politics of personal, familial, national, and bespoke ‘community-mindedness’ above and beyond others. Into this will be woven the bandwidths of selfishness through to ‘loyalty’ (at the exclusion of other loyalties), but in the end such exclusionism of the outside one’s own belonging or orientation will lead to exploitation or bigotry on some level or other. 

My personal concerns are to find a way around such exclusions, and to work on a respectful collective-communal decision-making that doesn’t diminish other communities and their connections to the biosphere, to specific places, to specific associations with others, to spiritual belief systems (or spiritual de-systeming). This is an anarchist positionality, of course, but at the core of this is a belief on my part that ‘leaders’ are inevitably part of any problem of diminished rights and unfair distribution of ‘wealth’. 

As someone who also advocates for animals and eco-systems’ rights in both empathy and totemic interaction through/by/with humans, but also an independence of ‘being’ (a respect for the ‘animalness’ of an animal, for example), I include ecological and ‘personal’ animal quiddity and rights in these discussions. ‘Leaders’ in communities might function in a quasi-representative way in which they are spokespeople for a group, but hold no real power and cannot make decisions that control and/or oppress others. I am not talking about that dynamic here. I am referring to leaders who make unilateral decisions that are not uniquely and completely discussed with their community of representation. 

It would seem that no political model outside anarchism achieves this. Every decision being one of mutual understanding and mutual aid, every choice one of collective affirmation. Once a leader is separated from that process, they are in essence a form of dictator. Sure, a leader operating with more checks and balances than one operating with few or none is only nominally acting as a dictator as opposed to the out-and-out dictator whose command system is entirely centred on their whim and response to any stimuli. But, essentially, with a leader who is not nominal, a leader who has the power to make decisions as even representative of their constituents without being in constant communication with all those constituents who could in an instant say ‘that person is not speaking for us’, then we are dealing with degrees of dictatorship. 

Involved in this capacity for taking on the mantle of speaking for others who are distant from oneself is a belief that one can do so with principle and affirmation of having been chosen in the first place. There are degrees of choosing, from the small group selecting a spokesperson to the nation-state electing a government who selects a leader from their ranks, or direct election of a president, say, who the electors know has dictatorial tendencies. Leadership is something enforced through fiscal control, martial backing, and access to exclusive knowledge (‘security’). 

As I hear leaders say that a nation (or any national ‘sovereignty’), for example, ‘has a right to defend itself’, I have to ask myself what defence is, as I have done since my late teens. ‘Defence’ is a quality of violence. ‘Defence’ is entwined with ‘attack’ and not really its opposite (maybe more a theoretical ‘counterpoint’). ‘Defence’ is the right to strike first as the ‘best form of defence’. ‘Defence’ is the quality of a colonial beachhead expanding into ‘hostile territory’, and living by constant pre-emptive action. Or when ‘defence’ is more literal (as in a nation-state being attacked by another), it can so quickly become ‘flexible’ to incorporate acts of aggression that extend far outside its earlier response/defend definition.

All nation-states have at some point or another formed out of military presence and maintain themselves through the same. Nation-states are built on values of control and oppression. Australia-as-nation is an example of that predictable claim of fair ‘treatment’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands peoples via the state’s elected and appointed leaders and the institutions they are extensions of and embedded in. A faux ‘fairness’ to the very people who were dispossessed by colonialism... and many of whom experience an ongoing state of psychological and material siege. 

As someone who strongly advocates for a ‘no-state’ approach to habitation of the world (communities rather than nations), and for the rights to co-inhabit land with respect for difference and with mutual support/aid, and for the valorisation of and full respect for any traditional relationship to country (and for complete intactness of those Indigenous relationships to country) while allowing for the peaceful co-existence of those with different connectivities with place (including newcomers — ‘migrants’... a word that is manipulated depending on where one sits in the equation of movement and ‘settling’), I see the core offence in the unthinkable hatred between communities around ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ as arising from ‘leaders’ and ‘nation states’. The powerful nation-state of Israel is using its military power to control, oppress and destroy its constructed ‘enemy’.

Once organised into financial-military blocks of difference, with religious leadership and control over peoples’ lives being attended covertly or directly with the state/s, these ideas of nation establish conflict, apartheid and exclusion from their very inceptions, be that more recently or hundreds or thousands of years ago. Identity built out of exclusion risks conflict and the exploitation of an eternalised ‘other’. This should not be happening on any level.

This generalisation can extend to Ukraine and Russia, or anywhere else, allowing for the highly specific inflections of history and disintegration between larger community demographics over time. Each ‘case’ of hate is different, but behind them is the ‘leader’ or ‘leaders’ (from government to military, from ‘church to state’, and so on) making unilateral decisions for collective situations. 

As fascism consolidates itself in Israel, the United States, Russia, China, Italy, Hungary, Iran, North Korea (with strong tendencies in the South as well), Ukraine (try being a pacifist in Ukraine under the present military regime... Ukraine is experiencing a colonial invasion, but it is also embracing the values of ‘leadered’ militarism and a cessation of tolerance for contrary views on achieving peace).... it hovers around the edges of the militarism of the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany and so many other countries where it is participatory and exploiting through internal oppressions and bigotries, control over adversarial voices (especially in the arts and ‘humanities’), the manufacturing and sale of armaments, and the compliance of leadership with the power and ‘bonuses’ (or withholdings) of superpower leadership. 

If a ‘business leader’ such as Elon Musk can wield as much power as the Robber Barons or, say, Alfred Krupp and his company, and use a spuriously ‘free’ social media platform as an extension of power to gather ‘like minds’ to form ‘posses’ of social bullying and control, then that leadership speaks for itself (and, perversely, proudly). Or The Dictator with his military parades, penchant for gift acceptance from corrupt and exploitive regimes akin to his own positionality, simply creating his own social media bullying platform. Leaders empower themselves beyond their initial ‘support’ and vectors into public office with guns (the bottom line), and guns rule the world. 

Those who deny genocide is happening in Gaza (and other parts of the world — in those places off the Western media radar), those who deny the massive number of weapons-related deaths throughout the world, those who deny that the destruction of habitat is a participatory mass-extinction event, and those who see themselves as being morally, culturally or ethnically superior to others, are emboldened by leaders who either embrace similar ideologies or who essentially cover for them, allowing them to feel ‘represented’ in their hate. Leaders exist because we allow them to be leaders and we have established systems and platforms to ensure such leadership. 

If we fail to:

— completely disarm

— to respect country and Indigenous claims whilst allowing for the free (borderless) movements of peoples (with respect to bio-protections to prevent the destruction of habitat — and this to be conducted on a voluntary/shared basis without punitive actions)

— to de-martialise policing so that small community groups manage their own ‘policing’ in non-violent and non-punitive ways

— to create universal healthcare on all levels, to deny anyone leadership roles beyond being spokespeople

— to reduce mining to the bare essentials for life and to de-industrialise (a slow process... but let’s start with de-nuclearising and de-fossil fuelling)

— to redistribute wealth fairly

— to start nurturing all that remains of old-growth forests and committing to an ideation of vast replanting and habitat restoration

— to end the abuses and destructiveness of industrial agriculture and animal exploitation

— to detoxify ecologies 

— to work through a sharing/barter communalism

— respect diversity of belief and respect diversity in all our communities

— end/renounce capitalism (which accords with all of the above)

then injustice will grow rather than reduce, and some will have much and others will be lost to the world. 

Every person has a right to be their own leader, and to enjoy their own communities without abuse.

The Insistence of Protest is What We Have to Hand in the Hope of Bringing Immediate Change - for Gaza

Ariadne

 

So brief a mention in the accounts

of transition, your crown the party

god’s to hurl into heaven, a shining

example of whim and compassion.

 

As string or chalk mark the foundation’s

setting, and as a silvery thread guides

the hero out of the labyrinth,

your hopes are scattered or, worse,

 

formalized into a pattern. As world

decays, and strategy is starving

and bombing kids into submission,

all heritages become entangled.

Old positions /new inflections.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Do Not Forget What is Going on in Gaza — It is Remorseless

Derelictions of Grammar and Rhetoric

 

‘...achieve all of the war goals in Gaza’

 

            latest official communiqué from the Israeli military government

 

 

Refrain of bombardment

and the oldest refrain of blockade

            and starvation insist anaphora

            is failing — from an outside

looking in, knowing a repetition

of death doesn’t add up to wisdom

            or even a beautiful if pitiless verse.

 

            The ‘goals of war’ are an intoning,

a grammar of removal. As cataphora

is to anaphora, why are they, the ‘citizen-soldiers’

            so ready to sing a song of killing,

            so ready to believe they will clear

a path through their consciences

with tanks and bulldozers?

 

 

            John Kinsella

Launch Speech for Westerly 69.2

John Kinsella

I speak this in Walyalup on stolen Whadjuk Noongar country. It is said that within Western conceptualisations that Nouvelles de la république des lettres (News from the Republic of Letters), established and edited by Pierre Bayle in 1684, was the first ‘literary journal’. It focussed on book reviews — something that Westerly primarily does now online. But what interests me in this apparent ‘first’ is that though a French-language journal it was published in Amsterdam to evade French government censorship. That a book review journal or literary journal in general is necessarily political is, of course, embodied in the texts by different authors that make up an issue’s pages as much as a specific editorial stance or policy, and the resulting combination (or interference/non-interference) of what is published and how it is presented and discussed in a literary journal is an ethical concern.  

That a university-based journal such as Westerly retains such an independent and socially-ethically-focussed politics is admirable. That it lets texts it publishes be the texts they are intended to be in spirit and message. In the main, this is a characteristic of contemporary Australian literary journals, and let’s hope it always remains this way. Different experiences, different genres, cross-genres, intersecting experiences and beliefs, become a narrative of participation and communal overlap. A literary journal is seen to stand for something, and authors participate accordingly. Westerly 69.2 is an exemplar of organicism and respect, of diverse approaches to broader communal concerns, and for a collective creative rigour that opens doors to new creativity, invites future authors to enter the conversation/s.

If in reading a literary journal we expect to experience the unhindered originality and independence of the literary or critical texts, so we also expect that to be affected by how individual pieces are arranged in an issue, and especially by how they have been chosen. The criteria behind inclusion usually demi-locate themselves under ‘writers’ guidelines for submission’, with every writer inevitably consciously or subconsciously baulking at the various meanings of the word ‘submission’. In submitting work for consideration we are entering a world of editorial viewpoint, limited space thus limiting quantity for inclusion, and the general timbre of that literary journal. Westerly has been greatly expanding its submissions scope, and now welcomes on board graphic narratives. Fantastic!

In issue 69.2 there is that synthesis of arrangement of texts we look for as readers of broad-content literary journals — a sense of careful thought behind how one text leads into the next. It’s a connectivity that individual authors necessarily know nothing about and is one of the surprises of publication — how any author’s work associates with other works. 69.2 offers us numerous ‘smooth transitions’ but there are also have wonderful instances of different sensibilities engaging with around a similar theme but in such different ways we question the nature of our own tendency to thematicise. 

I am thinking in particular of the different ways of discussing relationship to children and, as editor Daniel Juckes notes in his introduction: ‘many of the works draw lines between mothers and children, children and mothers and grandmothers...’. But they are all such different expressions of the apparently (inter)connected. The sensibility at work behind the wry and deconstructive viewpoint at work in Carrie Chappell’s ‘Motherhood Poem’ times three is far removed from almost all motherhoods and kinships expressed in other works in the issue, but it also strongly overlaps in concern. Concerns expressed in very different ways — different cultural, experiential/bodily and philosophical contexts. This creates fracture lines of sensibility that compel us to consider our own positions vis à vis the material, the issue and ‘life’ experience.

Straight after the Chappell anti-confessional/confessional prose poem triptych, we have Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s intense and complex rendering of voice and reference around her grandmother which distils the epistolary prose poem as a pulsating form with its lament (or challenge): ‘Whoever he was, he believed in the human capacity to cultivate virtue. Virtue! I live in an age where people make fun of virtue’. A different irony, a different sadness, a different conceptualisation. 

Founded in 1956 and approaching its seventieth anniversary, Westerly’s history has been firmly anchored in the local while having both a regional and international outlook. Seeking to attune itself to the global/local dynamic, it has, over time, intensified its concerns around the nature of community and its responsibility to communities. And as Daniel maintains in the opening to his introduction, we as a community lost one of our much-loved local writers, thinkers, teachers and friends in Brenda Walker. Back in the mid-90s when Brenda was reviews editor for Westerly, she told me that fairness in editing reviews was a matter of integrity — to the reviewer, of course, but especially to the text. She felt the seriousness of being that interface between reviewer and text as seriously as she took the relationship between author and reader. Communities necessarily overlap, interact, or at least come into contact with each other, and Daniel and the editorial-production team at Westerly maintain this belief with a passion.

I am delighted that there is such a visual focus in this new issue. No art form lives alone, and a text itself is a visual experience. We start our cycle of reading with the richly evocative cover image Emma Phillips’s ‘Untitled #11’, 2023, with more works by this artist-photographer embedded in the vital around-country conversational piece ‘The River as Blood Line’. Richard Read’s immersive essay on the painting of Angela Stewart connects process with how we deal with loss and separation, how we grieve, in ways that subliminally reach out across the issue and, indeed, to Brenda’s passing. This is not to equate different griefs and losses, but to reflect on how the reader of a literary journal will make personal connections to texts they might feel kinship with, or a respectfully attuned interest that then makes them reflect on their own position in the world, how their own experiences affect others. Read writes of Stewart’s superb painting Für Alina (2022): ‘Für Alina was intended as the composer’s consolation for a mother missing her daughter after the breakdown of a marriage in which she lost custody rights’, and, ‘It can generate a feeling expressive of the mourner’s compromised will power and emotional paralysis.’ Grief in its many iterations is a strong presence behind the issue.

I’d like to note the remarkable essay by Aunty Tjalaminu Mia, of which the first part of three (the next two in coming issues), ‘Milebaar wer-moora kadidjiny won-gin wadjella-warr’ follows a relationship with a mother, grandmother, country and communities. The passing down of stories makes stories live in the present. Towards the end of this powerful work we read: ‘The way my mum shared her gran’s stories was so rich in the telling—it was like I was there with her and Granma Farmer, walking Country and enjoying the sense of freedom, connectedness and belonging’. 

As Aunty Tj notes earlier in the piece: ‘Gran said this was a crying shame and that the gov mob had a lot to answer for. But what could be done, except live their lives in a way that didn’t draw the government’s attention?’ In telling stories through her relationship to her mother a powerful relationship between cause and effect, between teaching and learning, develops. Empathy and understanding of the racism experienced by migrant Chinese men living and working in Katanning through proximal compassion and identification of patterns of vilification by the white power-holders/community undo some of the binaries established by colonial mechanisms. In order to survive the white assault on country and life, family had to ‘endure’ in order to ‘resist’. We read: Mummy’s gran was not prepared to have her grandchildren taken away by the Welfare Man, having been taken by the Red Coats herself when she was eight years old, so everyone had to do their bit to keep everyone together. // Granma Farmer’s approach to life could be seen as a form of resistance, because the family and children were together and still had an easier life than most Noongar families in the town.’ This is brilliant, devastating and affirming writing. It is why journals such as Westerly must exist and retain their political autonomy.

I will conclude by noting the individual skill, beauty, sharpness, tonal control, satire, and formal qualities of so many of the stories, poems and inter-genre works in this issue, the marvel and revelation of the interview-discussion, and sheer joy of presenting this work that gives a feeling of purpose to this issue. It is an act of liberty and justice, of contesting the ongoing colonial wrongs near and far from here.

 

The Brutality of the Live Sheep Export Industry

As a vegan, I clearly oppose all raising of animals for slaughter, but the live sheep export industry is a particularly cruel and egregious form of animal 'husbandry'. There is much evidence to show how much the sheep suffer on these 'livestock ships', and how many die horrible deaths through the (di)stress of transit. It has been grotesque for me to watch the 'keep the sheep' (euphemism if ever there was one!) campaign in Western Australia during the Federal election. It has been borderline aggressive at times and almost as confronting as the trade itself. This was a campaign based not on the usual 'feeding the world' scenario, but purely on vested interests and profits. There are other ways of farming. 

What's more, it's a furphy to keep identifying 'the rural' with the business interests of animal farming for slaughter. 'The rural' is far more complex than this, and the descriptor rarely includes alternative farming methods, non-conservative views on land interaction, the concerns of Indigenous peoples, and the myriad points of view that make up any community ('rural', 'urban', 'hybrid' or 'fringe'). Here is a poem written in response to the aggro campaign which often segued with the almost feverish desire to dilute anti-gun ownership laws.

Graphology Causality 31

 

If I’m the asymptote

            then I’m caught

in an offset to grain-

train heavy metal

            graffiti animation

            just as the corellas

flock a turning point,

ogonek to the greater

            circle of paddock

            propaganda: e.g. ‘keep

the sheep’ when they mean

‘live export the sheep’

            for slaughter:

            articles

and determiners, aggressive

ploys of an election.

 

 

During the election campaign, I wrote to both conservative candidates in this electorate to ask them to please stop nailing placards to the roadside trees in the wheatbelt (some of the placards on trees uncommon in the region) — interestingly, the Nationals candidate was responsive and courteous, saying that she'd issue instructions for it to be stopped (and I didn't see any new nailings after this)... while the Liberal Party of Australia candidate ignored my email and the signs remain nailed to trees. 

We might strongly disagree on issues (including the above!), but if communication is not considered worthwhile (because of different views?), then a very basic courtesy of the agora is ignored, and community damaged further by such indifference. Even with those I ethically oppose, I hope for peaceful, 'informed discussion'. 

My contestation is always pacifist and inclusive, and I will dialogue with all those I oppose in respectful ways rather than deny or ignore them. We can make this better, can't we?

            John Kinsella

 

Novel out in June: advance copies have arrived! Plus poetry podcast

Back in February I mentioned that my new novel, the second in my Queens of Navarre trilogy, would be appearing with Transit Lounge this year.

The War Within Me is a fiction based closely on the life of Jeanne d'Albret, and follows my earlier novel about her mother, the great writer-queen, Marguerite de Navarre.

Each book in the trilogy can be read as a self-contained story, but it's even better if you read them all.

Now the advance author copies of The War Within Me have arrived — so beautiful! — it feels very, very real... Counting down the days till it's out there in the world.

Cover design is by Peter Lo, using a portrait of Jeanne d'Albret from the School of François Clouet.

On the poetry side, you can now watch the podcast episode where I am talking with David Adès on Poets' Corner at Westwords.