Speaking for the Jarrah Forests and Celebrating Noongar Boodja

I am reading poetry at the wonderful Mandoon Bilya Festival run by the Bibbul Ngarma Aboriginal Association tomorrow and have specifically written the protest poem below for the occasion. The festival celebrates Noongar boodja — the river, wetlands, forest and earth... a sacredness that should not be under constant threat from the ecocidal activities of companies like Alcoa and South 32:

Let’s Talk About the Shining Future of the Jarrah Forests

 

Alcoa and South 32

wish to carve up

thousands upon

thousands of hectares

of jarrah forest

to extend their already

devastating mining operations.

This is the bauxite

gambit which seems

a fait accompli —

the complete package

of ‘jobs’ (an immediacy),

‘rehabilitation’ (employment

for graduates of conscience credits),

and ‘growth’ (the state, like dieback,

clinging to the roots of the companies).

 

Alcoa and South 32

wish to carve up

thousands upon

thousands of hectares

of jarrah forest.

This is an adjunct to being

‘waterwise’ (who needs

a water catchment when

there are desal plants

excoriating the coast?);

to ‘preserving the state’s

heritage’ (on boodja

there are prisons and smelters);

and the ‘green future’

meltdown that even AI

has trouble over.

 

Alcoa and South 32

wish to carve up

thousands upon

thousands of hectares

of jarrah forest.

It’s worth tracing

what precisely those

company profits

end up doing,

but even if we don’t bother,

then simply bandy around

the word ‘security’

and count the millions

of animal deaths the process

will incur, inflict, and spin

as a positive outcome

for the entire state,

country, traditional owners,

planet, solar system, universe,

mirror universes.

 

Alcoa and South 32

wish to carve up

thousands upon

thousands of hectares

of jarrah forest.

Let’s name every species,

then every member of that species,

of plant and animal that will be

annihilated in this process.

We’re all too busy for that.

We all have lives to lead.

Let’s talk about country.

Let’s talk about what has

already gone and how

its existence in spirit

is not enough, how it needs

to be present in all states

of being, part of all stories.

How a forest needs

to remain a forest —

leaf, wing, paw, air, water

and earth.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

 

Poem in Memory of 'CPG'

Eradu

            in memory of ‘CPG’

 

1.

 

It’s not what’s written

on a sign to mark

 

where a town was.

And it’s not the railway

 

gleaming, or the bridge

that carries it over the river.

 

It’s not the vast acreage

under crop nor the twisted

 

metal uprights of a forgotten

tennis court. Nor, across

 

the line, the single mandarin

tree with its startling fruit

 

in a bed of dried mud

and herbicided grass.

 

Nor is there a space

within the space for litotes,

 

a trick of colonial expression.

It’s not this then that —

 

it’s not permission to walk

your own country,

 

your own birth. And this

is not the explanation

 

you don’t need, but a way

of remembering. It’s loss. Loss.

 

 

(ii)

 

We are before the explosive wattle

with rabbit diggings at its base.

 

We are descending the steep

gravel road towards the river crossing.

 

We hesitate. We walk under the railway

bridge with its sensors, its elevation.

 

Gambusia are darting in shallow,

algal waters and sand speaks imprint.

 

Saltbush and river redgum utter

their true names and the sun

 

questions photographs. This your

birthplace, this our presence.

 

Water over the road. Water fading.

Honeyeaters define renewal.

 

 

(iii)

 

Divided by the road of quadruple

trailered mineral-carrying trucks,

 

Eradu North and South, nature reserve

and broadacre farming, outcrops

 

and river bed, blue lupin flowers

wavering in bush enclave, on paddock edges.

 

Listen closely to vocalisations of insects

across the fringed lilies’ stereocilia.

 

I know the red-capped robin is angry

while excited, is hyped up on other matters

 

but also letting me know where I do

or don’t stand. In the biblical incursion,

 

it might be imitating a jeremiad. An

old campfire at the lookout, the river

 

working wet and dry towards

its ocean mouth, the sandbar.

 

Between ‘Greenough’ and Mullewa.

Not between country and ‘explorer’.

 

Out of time, I will stand before

the cathedral altar under stolen

 

sacred stone and silently ask,

‘Will you hear my friend’s call

 

for justice? Will you undo yourself

into the sacred, the ancient country?’

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

Curtin creative writing: Festival of Writing, and Library Illuminates: Storytellers of the West exhibition

 By Tracy

We were at Curtin University yesterday because I was reading poetry alongside a wonderful line-up of Western Australian writers all with a connection to Curtin, as part of the university's Festival of Writing to mark 50 years since the "first graduating class" of their Creative Writing course (the course actually started in 1972). The festival included workshops and panels all day and concluded with a session of readings from Chemutai Glasheen, Caitlin Kotula, Caitlin Maling, Khin Myint, myself, Kim Scott, and Thomas Simpson. 

I first went to Curtin (then called the WA Institute of Technology, or WAIT), as an undergraduate in 1983, majoring in Literature and minoring in Creative Writing, but after my first year I went off to do other things, returning to Curtin on & off until I graduated in 1990. 

In 1993 and 1994 I taught there on the Literature course (poetry units, the reading-of and analysing rather than the writing-of!), and then again to teach creative writing, both poetry and fiction, in 2000 and 2001. So my connection with Curtin not only began a long way back, but spanned quite a number of years. 

A highly memorable writing teacher I had there in the 1980s (and there were many such) was the late Julie Lewis, biographer and fiction writer, whose lessons were so intensely inspiring that groups of students would spill over into the café afterwards to continue conversations begun in her classes. I remember Julie as a phenomenon of energy and especially gifted at teaching as well as at writing.

The venue that hosted yesterday's events, the TL Robertson Library at Curtin, is also holding an exhibition this semester covering the history of Creative Writing at Curtin from its inception under the late Brian Dibble through to the present. Library Illuminates: Storytellers of the West also features displays about six of us alumni who have published books across a range of genres. In addition, they have gathered a collection of books by Curtin-connected writers to borrow and return — over 100 of them!

John Kinsella also features in the Curtin creative writing timeline as he spent some years as staff at Curtin where he is now an Emeritus Professor.

Especial thanks to Jayne Cleave, Caitlin Maling & Rachel Robertson.

Here are some photos from yesterday, mostly taken by John:

Khin Myint, John Kinsella & Reneé Pettitt-Schipp

Tracy Ryan beside alumni display in library exhibition

Tim Kinsella enjoying book corner featuring 100+ works by Curtin-related authors

Tracy Ryan with Curtin Creative writing timeline

The full exhibition display featuring 6 Curtin writer-alumni

Tracy Ryan reads poems as part of afternoon event "50 Years of Writing at Curtin"

Storytellers of Curtin "Read & Return", some of the shelves,
with wonderful bookmarks on top, featuring writers!

On the Construct of ‘Whiteness’ and its Inherent Racism: Against the Anti-Immigration Marches in ‘Australia’

John Kinsella

‘Whiteness’ is essentially a pseudo-scientific imperial-colonial construct and an ideology. Or, given the ideology-driven nature of much of the science of hate/privilege/exclusion and self-validation via arrangements of ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’, one might just say ‘scientific’ construct with ‘scientific’ inside quote marks. 

Whether drawn out of the Blumenbachian ‘Caucasian’ racialism (such as there being a so-called ‘white race’) or any other categorisation of separateness and uniqueness, there is no such thing as ‘whiteness’. People have many origins, many forms of being in the world, and for ‘whiteness’ to be separated off is a political move to create a power base against other ‘categories’. So-called ‘white people’ are not actually ‘white’ in a way that makes them somehow separate and definitely not ‘special’ — it’s a false category. For those who have experienced the toxicity and imposition of ‘whiteness’, it is understandable they might set it up as an antithetical force, something to be wary of and ‘resisted’, but ‘whiteness’ as ideology thrives on being perceived as separate. So it needs to be non-violently resisted, of course, but not valorised in that resistance. Such a disturbing slippage happens more easily than is sometimes realised.

Those who identify as ‘white’ in order to valorise themselves, to make themselves ideally separate, are using the construct as a device for control and suppression of ‘others’. We can’t let this happen. Even within poverty, ‘whiteness’ potentially becomes a means of differentiating forms of poverty in a desperate search for validation and empowerment when the real causes of poverty are being ignored, or feel beyond rectification. The grotesquely unfair distribution of ‘wealth’ across the globe and within different communities (and between different communities) and hierarchical movements of capital are the cause, and so much of that wealth-accumulation is at the hands of and controlled by those who encourage and enforce a ‘white ideology’ as an idealism and reality. ‘Whiteness’ is a meaningless word given horrendous power by capitalism and colonialism, by greed and false and specious ‘belief’. 

I believe in the rights of people to be who they are and I celebrate multiculturalism and pluralism. When I say that I think ‘whiteness needs to end’, I mean that the thinking that whiteness is somehow something separate, exclusive, significant in itself and ‘special’ needs to end. It is damaging and corrosive thinking and harms the world’s wellbeing. I personally found the recent anti-immigration marches in ‘Australia’ threatening, frightening, disgusting and worrying. And extremely wrong on every level. The disgust many anti-immigration ‘citizens’ expressed about the presence of overt self-labelling neo-Nazis in these marches reeked of hypocrisy — the very values that are being espoused around anti-migration and the covalent ‘re-migration’ are fascist ideologies that connect with core values of neo-Nazi ideology. Make no mistake, theirs is a racist, ‘white-ist’ ideology wishing to reify (to force, in fact) a new White Australia Policy. The ideals of 1901 Federation were born out of white supremacy ideology, economic control, and a religiously-underpinned ‘secularism’ of theft of Indigenous country.

I feel we need to be many people and many persons in ourselves. I feel that we all have a right to live fairly and justly and equitably. And I know that in ‘Australia’ (a name that perpetuates Indigenous dispossession) all people live on Indigenous country and that needs to be respected in itself in all ways. 

‘Australia’ is not a ‘white country’ and never was. ‘Whiteness’ is an ideology of divisiveness. Too often, surveys for demographic stats — designed to ensure fairness and pluralism across identity difference — risk forcing an unintentional categorisation and sadly in turn actually reinforce a pernicious ideology of ‘whiteness’. This is one of the processes of rectifying injustice and supporting minorities that can potentially reinforce the control of the majority. As someone who feels that ‘majorities are by their nature oppressive of minorities, I feel it essential that any sense of a ‘white’ majority is deconstructed conceptually and dismantled as a reality. 

So, I argue for all of us to be different as we are in ourselves, and for ideas of a ‘white’ majority to be seen for the falsehood it is. There is no ‘whiteness’ outside the toxic construct of racists and bigots. The very same racists who opposed Black Lives Matters protests, which arose out of systemic violence in not only the USA but across ideologically ‘white’ colonial political structures around the world, who questioned the veracity of a united position against systemic racism, also claim a systemic plot against their ‘whiteness’ due to open and inclusive immigration policies. As always, the ideology of ‘whiteness’ adapts to suit its own needs, to push its own agendas of oppression, exclusion, exploitation and ‘uniqueness’.

A Poem for All Those Who Cannot be at Public Pro-Palestinian Protests but Support Them

This is a poem for those who cannot be at the protests

This is a walking poem,

not a marching poem.

It is a poem for all those

who cannot be there in person

to walk alongside others

to show support for those suffering

in Gaza, and it’s a poem

for all those people

who find it overwhelming

to be in public, especially

in large groups of people

even if they’d like to show

kinship and participate

in a mass public display

of empathy, in a protest

against the military

state, against the arms trade

and the occupation

of Palestinian lands.

It is for those who would

be there if they could,

but are unwell, or can’t get there,

or have others relying

on them to stay close.

This is a walking poem.

This is not a marching poem

because marching can take

on rhythms that are martial,

though such marching

peaceful marching

counters the martial.

So these marches

have their own poems.

Walking together creates

a circuit of collective

energy that illuminates

and draws others to its

aura without burning them.

Light that is atmospheric

and earthed. That resonates.

It is resolved and committed

and sensitised to the pain

of those on whose behalf

the walking together

is being conducted.

This poem is for those

who can’t be there,

and its lines walk together

and as one, even if it’s

to its own step and to the steps

of all those there on the ground.

This poem is for those

who can’t walk

together on the day

but want to have it known

that they care as deeply.

 

 

            John Kinsella

The Genocide in Gaza Must Stop Now!

It is unconscionable for any person who cares about others' wellbeing not to spend every minute of their waking lives resisting the grotesque murder and starvation of the people of Gaza. Israel has proved itself one of the most brutal, dehumanising and violent states in modern history, ruled by genocidal tyrants. Of course there are many who live in Israel who do not support this psychotic act of state vengeance, and who would have sought a peaceful route through the horror. To constantly cite the violence of Hamas, its long-term militarism and cruelty, in order to excuse attacks on the Palestinian people, is part of an act of collective abuse that finds its roots in colonialism and underpins genocide. Hamas is not Palestine. What's more, the psychology of killing because others have killed (and killing in return on such a vast scale that extends back as well as forward on the timeline) is the destruction of humanity itself. Collective 'punishment' is overtly unjust by any measure, but to use vengeance as the basis for centralised actions is so far away from any sense of human rights as to be grotesque. The murder of people trying to reach food supplies, the inducing of mass famine to reduce a people to inability to act on any level, and then to see them perish, is genocide. It's such a severe situation that making analogies between the behaviour of the Israeli State/IDF and any other 'similar' crimes of history is pointless. This act of genocide will become in modern memory the basis for analogies of horror and wrongdoing for decades. And as for the vileness of the 'doing' or 'not doing' deals over what is so obscenely an unequal situation, it fits the endgame of capitalist over-reach in which capitalism becomes a question of whether an entire people mean value to the world marketplace rather than whether they are people. Everyone of us is obliged to act to save the people of Gaza — they are people, not representations on screens, not statistics, and not objects whose absence or presence is ultimately summed up in terms of the market place, in terms of what they are 'worth' to 'players' and vested interests. It must stop. Israel must withdraw. Israel must step back and let more humane agencies enter Gaza to bring some hope and physical and spiritual restoration to the people and land it has tried to destroy and steal. Israel must face up to what it is, end apartheid and share country with those whose country it is.

    John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan

Poem in Support of Those Who Refuse Conscription

Conscientious Objection

 

Praise to those who refuse conscription.

Praise to ‘draft dodgers’ and objectors to war.

May the only thing they are ever induced to burn

be their draft cards. Let them stand against

the vast sways of their deluded societies

which crave and justify war as if it’s the answer

to their crisis, crises, situations, conditions.

Praise to the ones who stand against the claims

of ‘no alternative’, ‘responsibility to your country’,

and other epithets of manipulation and destruction.

Praise to the conscience that understands killing

leads to more killing and that military ‘camaraderie’

is the ultimate ganging up, bullying behaviour.

Praise to those who know cowardice is operating

in armies is facilitating starvation and the deaths

of children. To refuse conscription, to refuse to fight,

is not cowardice, and ‘bravery’ is not even a word

with an adequate range or an adequate history

to apply to such resolution, inner strength, morality.

 

 

            John Kinsella

The Mass-murder of Starving People in Gaza

Blue Light: Wealth and Power as Murder

 

To highlight an individual case

of starvation or to discuss the dozens,

 

hundreds, thousands killed trying

to reach food supplies in choke-

 

points overlooked by soldiers

who are impartial as nationalistic poets

 

is to metastasise metaphors

or fall into similes that never

 

wear down because of their brutal

effectiveness and disposability.

 

When we are dealing with the statistics

of war-induced famine — starvation

 

as a lure to wipe out an opposition —

we shift from one death to many

 

as readily as AI takes over morality.

And scrolling down to reports

 

of those who would vandalise trees

to defend their million-dollar views

 

having completely lost sight

of the avalanche of cause into effect

 

is ensuring that personal lines of supply

have been kept open even when

 

the ground has been flattened

and trees completely removed

 

from the blue-light picture.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

Review of Refugia by Elfie Shiosaki

I had been writing on the nature of ‘invasion’ in a military sense when I came to read Elfie Shiosaki’s remarkable new book of poetry, Refugia. Her scholarly archival reading of the nature of ‘invasion’ with regard to the military enterprise that was the ‘settling’ of the Swan River Colony is a remarkable and insightful glimpse into the nature of colonial invasion. And this melds ‘in the stars’ with a profound utterance from self and country that stretches and breaks any idea of the colonial lyric into something much more powerful, much more traced out of country.

With an intense sensitivity to her ancestors’ presence and with a deep spiritual connection to country, Shiosaki considers the colonial impact of the Beeliar hydrology, habitat, spiritual and material architecture of Noongar custodianship in the context of colonial-settler-military overlays and attempts at erasure. In tracing early Noongar protest and attempts at a just agreement regarding this invasion, Shiosaki projects and injects Noongar knowledges (and where they make connection with more northern Yamaji knowledges as well) with the immensity of the cosmos, bringing the stars, black holes and water ways (and the ocean) into a contact that is both generative and cataclysmic. 

The reflections and inflections through the experience of the poet in trying to address and commune with wetlands and water pulses around patterns of short and long lines, and staggered-line dynamics on the open form of the page. We journey with the body and spirit of the poet trying to find redress, to find answers from country itself, across ‘bend’, ‘break’, bud, the three sections of the work. Three non-colonial and anti-colonial ‘tellings’. 

There is a desire, almost a compulsion, for an end to the grieving of the invasion but there is no real possibility of this as long as that colonial invasiveness continues. Wadjemup, sacred island site of a colonial prison for Aboriginal people is spoken to with fires on the beach just as marches along Riverside Drive in Perth (Boorloo) under the eyes of armed police (of course) connect the statistically staggering reality of Aboriginal people, especially youth, in colonial jails now. Deaths in custody connects with the first months and years of the Swan River Colony. 

Spreading an Aboriginal flag in Temple Underground in London is an affirming and contesting moment, but no one really notices. The crowds move on around. This is a cosmological occurrence as well, and actions are witnessed and implicated in the stars: ‘the Whadjuk/ and Captain James Stirling/ those born under the Milky Way/ and those born under St George’s cross, a red rose and the Three Lions’(‘On the Edge’). Captain Stirling (massacre leader) whose presence is murderous, corrosive and entrenched still. 

The statement that ‘our understanding was never friendly’ (‘Misunderstanding’) frees the ongoing colonial manipulation of invitation and welcome arising (at least in part) out of certain first-contact accounts that are at the core of a settler sense of justification and reconciliation. If friendship was offered (out of the temporary impression or belief that the invaders were Noongar ancestral spirits returning over the sea) it was under a different set of terms of engagement. There was no friendship in the act of military invasion. In the pivotal poem ‘On the Edge’ we read:

     friendship and curiosity
     on the edge

    

     a boundary that will be raked over by boots

     by a false declaration of sovereignty

and this gives lie to any conceivable ‘legitimacy’ to just and equitable co-existence by the colony with Noongar people. It simply becomes an act of invasion, a process of ongoing theft.

The incredible gift of this book with its search for justice, restitution and redress is that it suggests a healing might come when the colonial invasion mentality is stopped. This cannot be stopped not by exclusion, but by change in the way settler culture addresses its past and also the grief of Aboriginal people in deep and complex ways. In the poem ‘Grandfather’, an ancestor of Shiosaki indicated in a ‘snippet of conversation’ with that colonial ethno-manipulator, Daisy Bates, says that ‘There has never been an attempt to annex neighbouring tribal territory’ by Noongar peoples. Invasion mentality is colonial mentality.

There is a thesis to be written on this book, but in the immediate term it should be read by anyone interested in true paths to justice. And from such works and invitations to response by other Noongar writers, we might understand that the ‘ancient root systems’ will bring the red eucalypt flowers and the Rio Tinto Tower will eventually give way to Noongar people being ‘reunited// in an historic reckoning’ (‘Refugia’). Noongar people will: ‘rise from the ashes// rise above the colony// rise into stars’ (‘Noongar Rising’).

            John Kinsella

Review of my French historical novel, The War Within Me, plus a video link below

By Tracy

The first few reviews of my new novel, The War Within Me, have started to appear.

I'm especially grateful for this recent one in InDaily by Heidi Maier, whom I don't know but who has many positive things to say about this story based on the life of Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre and Huguenot leader during the French civil wars or Wars of Religion.

'With its fluid, engaging, richly conjured prose and storylines and character studies that are so obviously underpinned by exemplary research, The War Within Me lives up to the immense promise of The Queen’s Apprenticeship, with Ryan ultimately creating a fully-realised portrait of Jeanne d’Albret that wholly convinces in its first-person narration and evocation of the age in which she lived, making the reader feel they close the book better “knowing” Princess Jeanne.

This is a work of literary historical fiction, to be sure, but it is assuredly informed by the twin disciplines of history and biography, and both make Ryan’s story infinitely richer and more multifaceted.'

The reviewer has evidently enjoyed Book 1 of the trilogy. But the novels also work as standalones — you don't have to read them in order, though there's the odd little bonus or textual (vegan!) "Easter egg" if you do...

You can also watch a multilingual presentation of and reading from this novel.

Video interview on Yellow Shelf — The War Within Me and the Queens of Navarre trilogy

By Tracy

My new book The War Within Me came out this month — a historical novel based on the life of Jeanne d'Albret — and recently Johanna Fink was kind enough to host me chatting on Yellow Shelf about this second novel in my "Queens of Navarre" trilogy.

You can watch the interview on YouTube.

And check out the book as well at Transit Lounge Publishing.

You don't have to have read Book 1 in the trilogy, because each book also works as a standalone. But if you're interested in Book 1, it's still out there too.

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