Australia the Warlord

             John Kinsella

 

 

It seems appropriate that regret should be uttered at a time of mourning. We have just suffered close personal loss, and there’s something very specific about the way a family deals with such loss in day-to-day activities, in the ‘emptiness’ of the early hours, and in reprocessing the nature of close relationships and what they mean.

 

And the regret I wish to utter is that Australia has fully committed itself to the path of militarism. The militarisation of universities that some of us spoke out against over the last decade in particular has come to a very rotten fruition under the present federal government. More and more arms companies (in all their tech ideations) are becoming entrenched in Australia, and from AUKUS to the manufacturing of missiles, from high energy yield weapons to sonar guidance systems, the speech of warfare is becoming normalised in Australian public discourse.

 

What bemuses me, as an extension of grief, is why I’m not seeing activists standing against this. In universities (in Australia and other countries) I have witnessed what amounts to quietism at best, and even in one instance, overt pressure applied by militarists (in various guises) to quell a pacifist voice as such as my own. People so readily accept a new status quo; under the ‘military solution’ approach to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the ‘be prepared’ stance regarding China’s own militarism, the voices of difference and opposition are crushed.

 

Witness the Australian Labor Party’s verbal attacks on one of their own in Josh Wilson, who along with others was accused of ‘appeasement’ for resisting the acquisition of nuclear submarines. Witness the deployment of war-time prime minister John Curtin as talisman (a racist and a militarist), and as lethal force of persuasion, based on an idea of history as conflict dialectic. ‘Appeasement’ is one of those vox-pop snap-grab terms that twists like the knife it is intended to be: it carries the white feather, cowardice, betrayal, and delusion in its militarist etymologising. As it is used with respect to an arms-race, it seeks to disarm the already disarmed. It’s pernicious and easy. Those who wield it ‘appease’ death and hatred as they do so.

 

No. It’s time to stand up to this endgaming, to deny the euphemisms of ‘defence’ and position it for what it is. People can get out there and protest fossil fuel usage (as they should), yet they don’t take on the defence industries? Come on!

 

Every day we are greeted with yet another extension of the ‘military vision’ (essentialised around the idea of ‘pillars’, what’s more), as today I rose out of sleeplessness and processing a lost life to read that Cocos (Keeling) Islands, where I lived for a short while in the mid-90s, is having its runway ‘upgraded’ for military purposes; that this ‘pivot’ of surveillance is necessarily going to become more and more a focus of ‘protecting’ Australian interests (and assets), as well as those of its ‘allies’.

 

The fate of sea turtles on the Cocos is another aside, of course. The lack of environmental scrutiny and clearances another. And then an article that has sad visuals of boys with their toys, and yet another exploiting military tech company using Indigenous country for their exploits: laser weapons. So many of these companies with their university graduates in enthusiasm-mode are inculcating themselves into the day-to-day functionality of the body politic and the ‘social organism’. An organism that is building-in its own death. What is literature to all this? A mode of decorative mourning? Literature won’t be there in the end because it can only write after the fact and not in medias res? The writing is now, the writing is not accepting the status quo, not expecting to be value-added by peers and official mechanisms. And yet we do, because writing is an extension of the self into the ‘outside world’. We need to work through this.

 

Apropos of all this, and related because the arc towards military arms dealer status (already was, but now aiming for warlord status) that comes out of the military occupation and oppression of Indigenous peoples: a comment on The Voice and where I stand.

 

I fully support all Indigenous moves towards the reclamation of their lands and rights, and I support the position of the YES vote as I totally oppose all that the NO vote stands for. However, I think that anything connected with the system of governance (colonial, oppressive) that rules Australia is inevitably going to be compromised and limited by definition (and legal actuality). So YES, of course, but only in itself, not by way of vicariously supporting the colonial militarist system of governance by proxy.

 

The collective vision of ‘Australia’ is compromised because of its colonial focus, and because it subscribes to an exploitive state-business collaboration, but it will inevitably become even more compromised with its leap into major arms dealer status. War is exploitation on every level, and people who would normally oppose the doings of arms companies quickly become silent at times of conflict (that concern them... whilst ignoring conflicts elsewhere that do not threaten their personal, ideological, profit or well-being status), even promoting, say, the manufacture of arms to send to Ukraine.

 

To oppose such gratuitous death industrialising is seen as relative, only belonging to ‘times of peace’ and to ‘better circumstances’. A whole ‘realism’/’realistic’ semantic construct is established to control discourse and to bring about an acceptance of a new militarised status quo. Violence is sold as peace, and ‘attack’, ‘defence’, and ‘justice’ are intertwined and made determinate of each other.

 

But mourning is mourning, no loss is acceptable, and no loss in its essence, in its actuality, is prevented by inflicting loss (and that includes on animals). The broader silence of many writers (especially poets) in particular bemuses me. While many relish there being a ‘leftish’ government in place, it’s a furphy — politics are shown by actions, not words, and the actions of the federal government are militaristic, nationalist in extremis, and citizenship-orientated. For such governments, environment is about functionality (even positive climate-change preventative actions are dressed in economics, common sense and survivalism), not about quiddity or something that might exist in itself outside utility. And to separate the damage of environment from the well-being of people is to create the destructive dualism underpinning the horrors of Western colonialism that has wreaked havoc on the planet for centuries.

 

The Truest Faces of the Military

Written by John, posted by Tracy


In the same way that the use of nuclear power can only ever lead to destruction and pollution of the very people it purports to help, so with the military in all its guises. If for a moment one is ever deluded into thinking a genuine humanitarian motivation underpins a military vision, think again. Unless soldiers have been drafted against their will, or maybe even drawn into the military out of poverty, only to find themselves enslaved to something every bit as destructive as starvation, inevitably the ‘thrill’ of violence underpins the decision to ‘join up’. Adventure at the expense of someone, somewhere. Or maybe something far more malign than that.

In my teenage years, I was highly ‘militarised’, and had every intention of going to Duntroon and becoming an officer. I was obsessed with strategy and tactics, starting with Alexander the Great, the Peloponnesian War, Hannibal, and Caesar’s writings, and worked my way through to the finer details of armaments of the Second World War, their manufacture, deployment, usage, and the general thinking behind total war. I was a strategy game aficionado. As with a chess game, I saw it as intellectual pursuit.

Wilfred Owen’s poetry made me rethink things. I connected the dots between ‘intellectual’ interest, and the physicality of playing wars in the backyard (and elsewhere), and issues of repressed aggression (often engendered by humiliation and inadequacy in the face of being bullied). As my political and social awareness increased, I found it a struggle to resist this urge.

When I look back I am aware that this struggle came out of a paradox: a belief in the morality of ‘protecting’ in the face of a desire for control, excitement and power (however limited). This desire for power arose from being bullied at school, and compensating for an offended masculinity. I knew many people who went into the military, or had been in the military in some capacity. I don’t now. Not a few of those who went on to become soldiers were bullies, were very often racist and misogynist. Military women I only knew through others.

Now, to be fair, this was not carte blanche. I did meet those whose moral convictions were melded with defensive nationalism, who believed they were doing good (though all claim to be doing good!). But still, scratch away and an excitement over military ordnance, and an almost prurient interest in the casualties of war, drove motivation.

It astonishes me that anyone should be surprised that Australian (or any) soldiers in Afghanistan should post racist brutalities on their facebook pages. Just be surprised that it got through the military filter system. The military is that, but knows it must hide it to survive. The military exists because people believe it is necessary. The very same soldiers that committed these offences against human dignity at the very least, and maybe much worse, will be tomorrow’s heroes if they are killed on the battlefield. Their individuality will be consumed by the nationalist cause, while portraits of their goodness will be painted. Ironically, the military (and the country) will treat who they really are with as much disdain as they are treating the Afghan people.

When I was a youth I worked on the wheatbins for a couple of seasons. Soldiering and racism went hand-in-hand for some of my colleagues. They know what crimes they committed against others. It was just an extension of the military dialogue into civilian space. From a war/military-obsessed childhood and teenage years, to total pacifism: it seems an obvious journey to me.

I live in a place where violence is worshipped. Guns are never far away and they go with an anti-ecological stance and general social conservatism. The army recruits from such demographics. They brush the soldiers up so as not to show it in public (though they do, anyway), but they rely on racists, bigots and ultra-conservatives to feed their recruitment drives. Those very attitudes are what allow them to kill an enemy. An enemy they wholeheartedly believe in, that they’ve been encouraged to believe in as they’ve grown up, watched television, played violent games, and towards which they’ve been socially directed as an outlet, rather than venting on their own streets (which is obviously also disturbing).

A couple of years ago I met a cop who despised guns. Despised violence. He didn’t believe in meeting violence with violence. He gave me hope. The military isn’t designed to operate that way on any level. It is the home of propaganda because it is founded on violence and not an aversion to violence. The military needs all the propaganda tools it (and the government) possesses to sell itself to those who aren’t violent by inclination.

All sewn up? No. I won’t forget the boys cat-shooting and fox-shooting and roo-shooting, hyped up and talking about joining the army. And I won’t forget their elders saying ‘it will do them good and harness their aggression — give them control and make use of it’. No, it just puts the aggression in a holding pattern until it’s let loose to serve the military overlord-vampires and their human helpers who can walk in the daylight.

Our small son has had to endure threats of shooting, knifing and witnessing a parrot corpse frenziedly beaten with sticks. Many of the perpetrators idolise the military and say ‘war is good, we need it’. I don’t doubt that more than a few will sign up when they’re old enough, encouraged by their parents, their peers and the state.

See this article. Actually, evidence of an endemic problem is implicit in the article’s title — the headline is as much part of the problem as the soldiers themselves. We all provide the environment in which these things are fostered and projected. These soldiers just do the dirty work. Watch who comes out to defend these actions. It won’t be surprising. Think about it.