Orcas are Not AUKUS

Prologue

They play

with eras

and oceans

with orcas

and strategies

of death

as unreal

as the pandemic

was to them

when it started

its run silent run deep

expedition

around

the planet.

    from Cellnight

Australia's arms race purchase of nuclear submarines from the US and UK is an endgame. The promise of thousands of jobs in an industry of death, and participation in the nuclear threat to the biosphere (accidents, leaks, and consequences of war), show that the obsession with a 'cradle to grave' nuclear industry is being made real in all its eschatological manifestations. All other 'smiling faced' policy shifts are meaningless in the face of such a threat to the well-being of the entire planet. The above lines are the prologue (written late in the process) to my verse novel Cellnight, which is a condemnation of the nuclear and military sell, and a consideration of how its toxicity affects all life. Though the book is based in the 1980s during the American Fleet visits, it is sadly as relevant now, and maybe more so. AUKUS is the ultimate embodiment of contemporary colonialism that deploys language in ways that pretends it's not. It is, and its 'run silent run deep' name is death. 

    John Kinsella

In Full Support of Ukraine and Against Violence On EVERY Level

I condemn the invasion of Ukraine by the military forces of the Kremlin and the tyrant Putin. This horrendous abuse of human rights and human dignity is deplorable on every level. As a committed pacifist, I firmly believe that non-violent resistance and protest are the most effective way of countering this abuse of life. Meeting violence with violence will mean more violence, more suffering. Total and utter refusal to do what the militarists demand is, to my mind, the only effective answer. 

I send my support and solidarity to all those in Ukraine who are under attack or under threat. I also send my support to those peace protesters in Russia who face arrest with their every objection and refusal to be part of a tyrant-driven Kremlin agenda of extending power and occupying country in order to enhance imperial obsessions. To the people peacefully resisting this, you are not and never will be forgotten. We are with you.

Taking up arms only means more death and increases the wealth of military profiteers. I am disgusted by Germany breaking its own 'restraints' to supply weapons to the conflict (though this is unsurprising, given Germany is an exporter of arms), and also by Australia for doing the same (also unsurprising, given it's a nation working hard to increase its role and influence in the world armaments trade). This is, of course, part of the increasingly right-wing urges of a right-wing Federal government that aims to project itself into global politics as a 'middle ranking power'. The disgraceful AUKUS pact, the drive for nuclear-powered submarines, the push to make the Australian military 'less woke', and the increasing push for military-related activities in Australian universities, are all part of this. 

The decision to send 'lethal aid' (an oxymoron if ever there was one) to Ukraine is part of the death cultism of right-wingism. The Russian power-elite shares a similar worldview, but with a 'stronger' military behind it. Violence leads to more violence. Send humanitarian aid in every way possible; aid should be life-affirming and not death-making in nature and intent. Peaceful aid will mean the preservation of life. 

Lethal Aid

 

There’s no point even placing

scare quotes around this.

In the frenzy for death to show

resolve where death is,

 

the Australian government

will send its devices of death

into the killzones, will feed

death so when death

 

comes to its end, a supplied

by Australia logo will light

up the graves, a small

if not discreet claim,

 

a reminder of assistance

rendered, of death’s compassion

for death. The invaders

will recognise it as kin

 

to their own way of thinking.

An aid to memory, of aid rendered.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Against Australia's Arms Trade Ambitions

           

          by John

So, the fascist regime wants to position itself to become a major arms exporter, to feed the horror and distress of military conflict around the world. Its concern about export to oppressive countries is a furphy, a way of positioning itself as righteous in exporting to the apparently ‘better’ countries, countries more efficient at screening their human rights abuses.

Australia hungers for power, and the constant papers and addresses to position itself as an influential ‘middle power’ are part of the same mentality that denies human-induced climate change, sees the remaining native vegetation and wildlife as something to delete or at best fetishise, something that stands in the way of ‘development’.

It’s tragic being inside this most nineteenth-century political and psychological immaturity — a game of states and borders, of power deals made by elites with vested interests in their outcomes. Australia is not decolonising; it’s recolonising and extending its ambitions into becoming a coloniser in overt and subtle ways. Arms exports are the most brutal form of colonisation.

This goes hand in hand with the abuse of refugees, of ‘turning back the boats’, of refusing to scrutinise the ‘fuck off we’re full’ or ‘if you don’t like it, leave’ mentality that rules in much of rural Australia, and in the suburbs as well.

One of the most appalling notions underlying so much of this pocket battleship aggression, this dreadnought hangover of the years leading to the First World War, is that of ‘any job being better than no job’. We hear this being peddled by politicians of the right over and over again. So, to manufacture arms that are used to kill is a just way of making a living?

There aren’t even semantics worth undoing here to show the blatant hypocrisy of such unreasoning ‘pragmatism’. The mining industry hugely benefits from arms trade, and all the ‘philanthropy’ of rapacious miners buying off academic institutions, and infiltrating the thinking and processing mechanisms of universities, doesn’t change the fact that in the end they provide the raw materials of bullets, guns, missiles, atomic warheads. The degrees of separation seem to protect their consciences, but in the end, the corpses are at their doors, and the doors of government.

Christopher Pyne’s desire to position Australia as a 5 percenter in terms of defence industry and sales is an overt fascist desire — the nation state develops and fosters industries that entrench a militaristic identity in which we are all expected to acquiesce or to be excluded.

There are no real rights in Australia, just illusions of rights. They are taken from us daily, and we do nothing. Australia already participates in the international arms trade; don’t think it doesn’t. And this should be stopped immediately.

But things are about to get a whole lot more bloody in the new patriotism stakes that are being foisted on us. If this core of colonialism is not addressed, Australia will consolidate its position as a New Colonial Power. For that’s what it is, and why people can’t see the wood for the trees given most of its forest and bush is being chopped down with nothing but dust in sight, chopped down and burnt or logged and/or turned to woodchips; it’s an astonishing feat of denial. But then again, note the sticker you see around here that supports the hunting and fishing party: a gun with a tick, and a tree with a cross through it. Get it, people?

High Ordnance Temporariness: Deathcultism and Deletions of Place

                               by John Kinsella

It is the air of atrocity.

An event as ordinary

As a President.

A plume of smoke, visible at a distance

In which people burn.

     George Oppen (from Of Being Numerous, 1968)

When I was a boy, actually through to the age of sixteen, I was obsessed with explosives and rocketry. Looking back from this point in my life, as a pacifist of thirty-plus years, I am bemused why the physics of explosions so fascinated me then. It was ‘technical’ and not ‘political’, though I was also in those days interested in things ‘military’, especially in terms of technology, equipment, ordnance and their relationship to strategy and tactics. The Australian military could have made good use of me if I had not had a pacifist epiphany (eventually).

And when I read of Al Weimorts, the civilian engineer working for the US Air Force Research Laboratory who designed the GBU-43/B Massive OrdnanceAir Blast bomb used yesterday on a Taliban cave network in Afghanistan, a horror of disconnection falls on me in so many ways. Obviously, the sheer brutality of this largest non-nuclear explosive device ever deployed as an act of war is horror enough in itself. This device, that has a one-kilometre-plus blast radius, and that will inevitably cause non-targeted casualties (though in the aftermath this has been denied), is the inheritor of the Vietnam forest-clearing 15000-pound bombs, ‘daisy cutters’, used by the US airforce, and then the bunker-busting bombs used by the US in the first Iraq War. The glibly nicknamed MOAB (I won’t even begin to untangle the Biblical subtexts), was designed for use in the last Iraq war but not ‘called upon’.

Al Weimorts, who died of a brain tumour in 2005, and was even celebrated in a New York Times obituary, was also the designer of cluster bombs used in Vietnam. On his hands is the blood of those killed by his death devices. He was a ‘righteous’ murderer, in the same way the designer Kalashnikov was (even with his near-the-end epiphany), or, for that matter, Leonardo da Vinci.

Many of us are personally implicated in this in subtle and obvious ways — and that is for each of us to consider and work out. Personally, as a child and early teenager, the fascination I had for ‘explosions’ (more than their ‘application’) was intense, and was only moved on from when I underwent an ethical and political shift at seventeen, developing an awareness that my politics of action were tied to the place/s I was in. That ‘explosions’ were a contradiction of place, that all I loved and respected was undone not only physically but also conceptually by my experiments.

When I exploded a ‘device’ to observe for effect, or set off a rocket to see what kind of altitude it could achieve, I was indifferent to the effect it had on the immediate ecology. The same kind of view of place as a performative stage for individual desire is what allowed me in those days to shoot things and fetishise weapons (all of which I long ago renounced and still renounce). Now I see that when those kinds of seeings are directed through work and patriotism into the Al-Weimorts-take on the world (that man with his children and grandchildren, well-dressed even at work, neatly groomed in the pics), the gap between being in a place and destroying that place is wider than death.

Weimorts witnessed the one previous explosion of a prototype of the weapon in 2003 at a site in the US (we see a forest in the background which we imagine was vaporised), so he physically felt and saw what it did to place. A place set aside for the testing of weapons, a place that had lost cultural and ecological variables to ‘necessity’, a replacement of ontology of existence with temporariness (the site before explosion) and a new presence of emptiness (post-explosion). The explosion caused by that prototype resulted in a mushroom cloud that could be seen 32 kilometres away.

Now, many years after Weimorts’s death, the Trump administration has used Afghanistan as a site of demonstration to impose its new global order. The American command in Afghanistan is denying that the use of this weapon is connected with Trump administration posturing, saying it was purely an internal ‘on-the-ground’ military decision made because the terrain and target were ‘tough’ — but only the deluded would accept this bit of propaganda as fact. This was an act to show the world that the US is ‘permanent’ (at least the pro-Trump parts of it!) while the rest of us are ‘temporary’.

 The US military used ‘daisy cutter’ bombs (at least one) early in the capitalist war in Afghanistan to vaporise entire deployments of Taliban, so a country was already made temporary before the new permanence of mass destruction. The non-nuclear is sold as a step down from total annihilation, but it’s also the calling-card of the total destruction that will come. The simulacrum of a nuclear weapon without the ‘fallout’. Just deletion and cascading effects on habitat (of humans, birds, animals, micro-organisms, those scarce plants in ‘desert’, and inhospitable — how can we even use this word? — place/s).

The desire to go nuclear, to merge the theory of general relativity, the escapism of wormholes, and the mediated ethics of Einstein (representative of human aspiration and ‘genius’), into a digestible paradox of being, of being under conditions of capitalist-state ‘liberties’. The ultimate home defence is to attack before they get to the door. In the same way the Geneva Convention underpins warfare by defining degrees of abuse, in the same way the RSPCA underwrites the slaughter industry as long as it operates within their definitions of non-cruelty, so the MOAB is the atomic bomb when you’re not having (allowed to have) an atom bomb. It is a lot less ‘powerful’ than an atomic weapon, but it makes a big impression and causes big damage.

Also, as a thermobaric weapon, the MOAB (it offends to use the acronym — they wish us to use it... this is the problem with all namings) sucks oxygen from the area around the detonation to feed the reaction, and in doing so evacuates space/place of even that marker of life. Through the caves and tunnels in the mountains it was targeted at, it deletes in manifest ways. There is more than a symbolic act in this.

The ultimate message: all living things, all places, are temporary before the might of US imperialism. Weimorts is the enabler of this imperialism, rewarded with the signs of the empire. Further, it’s not just a deletion of people (potentially on a massive scale), but also the deletion of the markers of culture and even the topography, geology and ecology of the place. This particular weapon is not a deep-penetration weapon, but is said to have ‘low to medium’ level below-ground impact with an absolute deletion of what’s on the surface in the blast range. Yet it does affect what’s below (thus its use against a broader cave system), so its implications are those of terraforming — rescaping the planet for eventual colonisation.

There is no gap between the cultural weapons of radical religious bomb-makers and the Al Weimorts of the United States. Both look to ‘defend’ by ‘attacking’ — conserving and extending their belief systems in the process — and also to remove the markers of the previous culturality and topography. It’s worth noting that the Russian military brags of having a ‘conventional’ bomb at least four times more ‘powerful’ than the MOAB, and the Americans themselves have a ‘bunker-buster’ that has a higher ‘conventional’ explosive yield. And with the ultimate deployment of ‘nukes’.

Nukes — that word that has almost become affectionate euphemism in a gaming age, as a kind of reflex action regarding power and inadequacy... Trump thinks of these endgames in the same way... because they are so real, they are made unreal... a taunt in the playground in which the taunters, the victims, and the playground, are all temporalities... slippages in time-space that have everything to do with going to sleep and nothing to do with waking. The temporary itself is forced through a wormhole of temporal fantasising — vast time-scales are drawn upon, the half-life of plutonium bandied about like military budgets. We live in this grotesque unreality where place is localised or internationalised by causational connection, and shared responsibility is somehow lost.

It was with disturbed interest that I read of an ‘end-state’ in military-political thinking today (I wrote this article on ‘Good Friday’ but am revising on the Saturday) — its glibness is horrifying (and I think likely also to the academic who deployed it) and in writing my Graphology Endgame poems it sadly has to come into play as a static in the background, or a different form of fallout. This from the ABC news website regarding the use of the MOAB, quoting Professor John Blaxland (of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University): “‘This is telegraphing to the opponents of the Government in Kabul that the United States … is now upping the ante, and is prepared to kill many people to achieve its political end-state,’ he said. That end-state, said Professor Blaxland, is for the Taliban to cave and for the US to be able to reduce its presence in Afghanistan.” So we have pursuits of end-state while playing humanity to an end-game. Grotesque.

As a young person obsessed with ordnance, an obsession I no longer have, I went through a variety of decision-making processes every time I made an explosion. My interest was specifically in the rapid uptake of oxygen in a reaction (the MOAB exploits this to the fullest) and literally the colours an ignition produced.

I was less interested in the stress placed on the container in which the ignition took place, though I almost died (along with two others) when a 3mm steel pipe went off ahead of time and sent shrapnel three feet underground, the explosion being heard 5kms away. That was my epiphany — because of coming close to losing life and causing the loss of life, but also because (a) the ‘controlled’ event did not behave as I’d expected (b) the ecology around the event changed so decisively that I finally understood that such events have long-lasting effects on topography and on culturality. They permanently change what we (especially as kids) might consider as temporary and continually available to change (our little ‘improvements’! or a change can happen because it was ‘nothing much to worry about’ to begin with) — that is, the change can have repercussions.

And such events do change surroundings — they damage flora and fauna, of course, but also a place’s psychology. They make it ‘feel’ vulnerable. They place it (and I choose the word carefully) on tenterhooks. What I was doing (in the name of ‘science’!) was wrong, and I turned against it, which given I was also deeply interested in things military back then, was surely a healthy thing. And as my politics and ethics evolved, my repugnance at such terraforming, such cultural impressings, has led me to metaphors as redemptive acts of place ecology.

Having said that, I think creative thinkers can hide behind the figurative while still being fully implicated in the damage being done. Metaphors can be violent as well as healing; but more than that, they can create a reality in which the performance of a screen-place, in which the creator’s morality is played off against the (bad) morality of the non-creative materialist. We surely have to be wary of this.

I am looking at a photo in the public domain, presumably supplied by the US airforce to the world at large, with the caption: ‘Al Weimorts (right), the creator of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, and Joseph Fellenz, lead model maker, look over the prototype before it was painted and tested.’ Rather than paste the photo in, I’ll tell you what I see. (‘Brown bear brown bear, what do you see?’, that classic of American literature my son grew up with, that prepares ways of seeing that loop our selves into a material reality, a linguistic and visual presence in place.)

I see two men and the ‘homemade’ bomb before it becomes the industrial weapon (apparently, to this point, only fourteen have been manufactured);  they look serious and yet ‘mature’. The ‘model-maker’ — such a ‘play’ title — and the designer, both exhibiting confidence and gravitas, there’s a most serious production. And yet almost casual, too — we can whip this up in the back shed because that’s US know-how and culturisation. This place of making can replace all places. And more than that is not worth noting. It is what it is — from someone who played weapons inspector in Iraq, a seeker for weapons of mass destruction, a weapon of mass destruction ‘half in love with easeful death’. The weapon looks solid, well constructed, permanent. Its moment of destruction is an eternal marker of human endeavour — the post-it note on place, dropped from high altitude (‘air supremacy’) from the back of a cargo plane (an MC-130) and ‘guided in’ with GPS, from here to there. The ironies implode in direct proportion to the explosion. Oh, and the men touching the unpainted weapon: lovingly, cautiously, and confidently. All of this, in the theatre of the photograph. And never forget the early days of the war: Halliburton, Bush, gas. Lest we forget.

These horrific doings in the unravelling of the narrative of human presence on the planet — its unravelling by the few who have the power, also of all our narratives in our inability to prevent them, and in some cases, complicity — are a denial of the essence of place in the human condition. By disarranging place, we deny place. Such massive violence against life and presence, against the markers of belonging, is showing our temporariness while claiming an imperial permanence in which power and enslavement to death are projected through time and space. All our stories of implication are relevant to attempts to reassert Eros over Thanatos, to reconfigure the spatial and temporal variables of our shared existence. We need to analyse the play, the actions, the events, and the narratives of our own lives from earliest memory and see how they have participated in or diverged from the deathstory of global and local militarism.

On occasions, I have turned to Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (trans. Ann Smock; University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1995) for ‘pithy’ summations of horror. But it too often fails me. Regarding Eros and Thanatos he says, and I can see this, ‘There is not the death drive; the throes of death are thefts from unity, lost multitudes.’ (p.46) But as part of his essay, Blanchot also cites Mallarmé: ‘There is no explosion except a book.’ (p. 7). This is under a separate ‘bullet’ and sits alone: it is a critique, of course, of its own absurdity, but it is also given reflective space. It is true, and yet absurd. Under the MOAB blast, in the caves of the violent and sadistic and deathcultish enemy, there are gestures of the human. Snuffed collectively. And insects and birds move above. And creatures we ignore. Snuffed. The English teacher, Mallarmé, has to shake our foundations linguistically to make such a declaration simultaneously float, and attach. All our personal stories validating our presence, the presence of our families, our people. As entwined (or not) in place, the land/s.

And yet, the MOAB is still made and many people are proud of its making. It’s what you’d expect. The schools that made the engineer. The jobs. The belief systems. Family (liking it or not). Community. Circumstance. Notions of enemies. The fallout is devastating. We register the explosion on a seismograph. And yet, there is no spike in measurements of radioactive fallout. That almost ‘largest’ non-nuclear device.

But then Blanchot follows with his next — or his publisher’s next — bullet point: ‘The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience — it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. What does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing, is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or extratextual’ (p. 7). Yes, because all writing has been vaporised. Even those who in their caves see literature as corruption, even their hands for writing and typing have been vaporised. The page is gone. No new pages replace. Does the translator of Blanchot, does Blanchot himself know what ‘beyond the pale’ does in this context? Probably. And if so, what of beyond writing beyond fragments beyond disaster? The disaster has been deleted. This post-disaster acceptance. These acts we perform after hearing the news, as we all do. These copyings and rewritings of our own narratives.

Just a few ‘paragraphs’ before he mentions the Bishop Faustus, Saint Augustine in his Confessions writes (roughly, in the Penguin books R.S. Pine-Coffin English translation, 1961): ‘Clearly the wicked do not know that you are everywhere. But you are not bound within the limits of any place. You alone are always present, even to those who set themselves apart from you.’ (p. 92). I treat this in a secular light on Good Friday, the most sacred Christian time. I copy this onto this ‘page’ in the long hemispheric of a secular patriotism that allows such barbarity as the MOAB to even exist. Make no mistake that such massive deployments of violence require spiritual sanction: even the most brutal states will make use of any ‘permission’ and validation they can acquire. The wicked do know ‘God’ is everywhere, and that God is unbound by the limits of place. And the same for the temporal.

But this idea that place is a human limitation over-ridden or over-come or incorporated by God is a very earthly desire: the desire to be larger, and controlling of place. And what better way to do that than delete place. To replace ‘place’ with the constructs of military-capitalism, fill in the holes with the machinery of ‘liberty’. The metaphors of othered history that we pick over for evidence of material and non-material existence are the permissions we collect for our actions, collectively and individually. We could all stand up and refuse! If that happened, the war machine would stop, and the God so many want to believe in would be respected in all place(s), not in acts of hubristic and horrific deletion.

Graphology Endgame 63

We wish to extract

from what we can’t see?

Oxygen from surroundings

to facilitate an explosion

spirit from emptiness

to fill those voids

A love — no, no, a need —

for gravity wheedling us out.

Or a question of limits,

statutes, gasping

for aspirations.

Workshops

of erasure.

-->

The EPA in Western Australia is Corrupt, as is Too Much of Australia!

by John Kinsella


If any of you have ever doubted that Western Australia has been built out of corruption, try this one. Numerous mining and development projects have been given approval by the horrifically inept and corrupt Environmental Protection Agency (that friend of miners) when by their own admission there were conflicts of interest on the board.

This includes board members having shares in the very companies they were granting approval to for environmentally damaging and invasive projects.

So what does the Western Australian Government do? Stop these illegal projects (they are on a massive scale)? NO, they are seeking retrospectively to ‘validate’ the projects by changing legislation. See this article for more details.

Australia has become a mockery under the rule of conservative governments, greedy mining interests, and with its increasing tendency to racism and bigotry in media, sports, community and elsewhere. It is a disgrace and yet, other than the few who will always stand up and show their hands against these corruptions and exploitations, so many Australians want life to roll on as complacently as usual for them. The Lucky Country despite the irony of that name should be the Selfish Country; time to be blunt about it. The Australian environment is abused and destroyed — every speck of it will be consumed through one trick or another. Zoos are all so many Australians seem to take to heart.

Further to the above, last week I sent this letter to a number of editors of journals and newspapers... I guess it speaks for itself:

dear editors, though you are arts and literary editors, and not political editors, some of you will not be surprised by this missive — especially where i have corresponded with you for many years. however, i do appreciate that you still might have doubts regarding the relevance of this given your positions (or independence from editorial policy) in terms of your newspapers’/journals’ political hierarchy.

i am one who firmly believes there is no separation of the arts and politics, and whatever we say and do artistically impacts someone somewhere — silence can be a powerful tool, but more so are words, images and music. i wish to register my absolute disgust with australian political culture, and for me that is most effectively articulated through arts practice and through communicating with those who comment on the arts in australia. your position, in some ways, is more ‘powerful’ than the opinion pieces of your newspapers’ social and political commentators.

i have never taken you for granted, nor seen you as ‘artsy’ neutral. you are not. you have as much responsibility as any of us to demonstrate an awareness of what is happening in an australia that is seeking to gain a part, a role, in the redistribution of power around the globe. we have had right-wing governments before, but few have been so aggressive and militaristic — few would put a position in ukraine over genuinely and commitedly helping to tackle the ebola outbreak in africa. the warmongering desire to create a militarised zone that is ‘team australia’ is oppressive in so many ways with little liberty or freedom about it (as in the ‘boats’ turned back on the ‘high seas’).

i feel we have reached a watershed in our literary as well as our socio-political history, and i beg you to speak out or at least register that we are being confronted with a ‘putin in australia’ itself. i’ve long joked that abbott is more putin than putin, and now he wants to wrestle him in the bear pit to show what kind of balls he has. fertile, aren’t they! the macho posturing is beyond embarrassing, it’s bloody dangerous.

as this government plays the uranium game, the world war game, and the team australia game, too many australians are starting to look benignly upon and indifferent to what’s being played out. it’s not the case — and it’s certainly not the case with any of you whom i have worked with, admired, had differences or agreements with! point is, you are arts/literary people working to give us more than material comfort, more than aggressive satisfaction, more than the sum of our selves.

you matter and have voices. please speak out!

Narnia from page to screen

By Tracy

Tim (now 8) and I just finished reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe together. It's a book I have some reservations about, but he's got a huge appetite for fantasy fiction just now (John's reading The Hobbit with him), and so in some ways it was inevitable.

This weekend we also watched the film version, and it was interesting to see the changes that had been made between the two formats.

Some were minor alterations to make the children seem more feisty (perhaps), such as their breaking a window with a cricket ball to send them hiding into the wardrobe (as opposed to the novel's idea, which has them merely seeking to escape visitors).

Others were minor gender-role revisions. (Tim had already observed that Susan's reluctance for adventure and pushing forward was "like Anne in the Famous Five" -- although to be fair, in both story-worlds the more nervous girl-character is offset by a braver one.)

All in all, the film would not be a disappointment for readers of the book -- though a comic scene Tim was looking forward to, in which the cowardly White Witch lifts her skirts and flees from Aslan's roar, became a mere sinking back into her chariot before him, removing the bathos I suspect Lewis was trying to associate with the ego of evildoers...

It was beautifully animated and the children were good in their roles. Tilda Swinton is a perfect White Witch and a hideous vision especially when she turns warrior-queen in the latter half of the film.

But it's always disappointing for me, the way that Lewis's story can turn what could be an image of non-violent response (Aslan's suffering at the Stone Table) into the core of a quasi-militaristic vision (self-sacrifice = the noble interpretation of war?).

Setting aside the question of whether the heavy-handed Christian allegory at times mars the story, Lewis comes across as at pains to avoid any possibility of pacifist ideals. Overtly, for the children in the story, growing up and growing better means accepting not only the need to do harm, but the "nobility" of doing so under the supposedly appropriate circumstances. (Lewis of course famously wrote a speech entitled, "Why I Am Not a Pacifist", so it's hardly surprising his fiction should be so hooked on violence.)

ANZAC Day and Pacifism

Written by John, to express sentiments held by both John and Tracy

Stated straight out, we believe ANZAC Day is an extension of the State’s desire to keep the population militarised.

From school classrooms where it is the prime focus of nationalist propaganda through to the television screens across different stations — interdenominationally, if you like — through their trans-vector fronts such as religious organisations (which have vested interest in the militarisation of the State to protect themselves and to use as a vehicle or vector for their own imperialisms), ANZAC Day focuses aggression.

We have no problem with acknowledging the horror of war, the brutal loss of ‘civilians’ and ‘soldiers’, and lamenting of humanity’s folly in allowing war to happen in the first place.

The inculcation of State values is, of course, desired by much of the population — though if such people were aware of having been propagandised, no doubt many would still choose the path of glorification rather than lament.

When the dawn services call to memory men and women who died in war, they cast it as sacrifice for the nation, for the country. This may or may not be true in individual cases, but it certainly can’t be made as a generalisation.

My Auntie Dulce is one of the last still-living wives of a Gallipoli veteran, Harold - a soldier of the 10th Light Horse, who came to believe in peace and never war. Uncle Harold, who would never march on ANZAC Day, never trade in what one might call the ‘currency of medals’, used to say, ‘Don’t let them glorify it – it’s not glorious, it’s brutal.’ And he felt that if talking about it would help people understand it was brutal, then that was worthwhile – but not if it was intended to glorify.

So we don’t object to the conversations that come out of ANZAC Day, but we do object to the militarisation of our children at school, our ‘selves’ as part of the country.

To give a sad intensity to this lament, we are disgusted to see that the Australian Defence Minister used this day to announce in Afghanistan that ‘diggers’ had ‘killed’ a hundred Taliban. Crowing over their skill in killing, the hierarchy cast it against the background of personal and collective sacrifice for the nation. Disgusting.

Did they mention the Afghan children killed by Australian troops in ‘crossfire’ during a military activity a couple of months back? We doubt it.

ANZAC Day is not about the people killed by ‘our’ soldiers, but about affirmations of the State as a military entity. Military entities require selective memories as much as they require poetry and art to feed their myths of glory. Every poem we write should be an anti-war poem. Every poem should be an affirmation of non-violence. Violence begets violence — and you don’t need to be part of a religious hierarchy to make this call. Pity religions didn’t abide by this observation.

ANZAC gatherings without uniforms, without weapons, without the military at all, would be an alternative — if people must gather for such things. By all means, lament the loss of humans, the death, the maiming, the damage to the environment, animals, plants. Lament the damage to the spirit of all. Not a gun in sight. Never. Read Wilfred Owen, read Leon Gellert or any of the many women poets of the First and Second World Wars (for example) who wrote against war and if not combatants experienced the horror in equivalent (or greater) measure. Poetry as activism.

The terrorism of states

Written by John, posted & shared by Tracy

The machine of the state is essentially militaristic. The state of Israel is a fully military colonial machine. The destruction of the Palestinian people is its core aim — to create space for itself, to assuage its own guilt at its mistreatment of those who do not ‘enjoy’ the privileges that come with participating in its statehood (and who resist its expansion/consolidation), and to ensure its own survival.

All states defend their own existences, and the existence of Israel has its obvious historical reason for being (and in some ways the psychology of its aggressions is understandable, if contradictory — but being understandable does not make it right). It’s the idea and reality of the state itself that engenders the brutality of a modern Israel, and any other state for that matter. Australia, the United States of America, Russia (and its so-called ‘federation’), the United Kingdom, China, France... right down to the smallest island nation-state, are part of the same picture.

Human brutality is not isolated to ethnicity, creed, or belief, but to the abrogation of self and community empowerment to the centralised militaristic ‘protection’ of the state. Every soldier is made a murderer by the actions of the state. Every soldier who participates is responsible, whatever they do or don’t do. It is a collective guilt and a collective injustice. Participants — voters, party officials, those who pretend it’s not their concern but continue to benefit from the state’s military actions — are equally culpable.

Non-violent resistance is the only way — and as poets, every poem we write should be a form of resistance, an act of linguistic disobedience. States murder more than they protect. And they protect to perpetuate their own existences. Disarm Israel. Disarm all states. Disarm all individuals. Weapons are a violation of all people’s rights. Until people who are not in the killing zones understand and resist the state, the killing will continue. For most, it’s a moment of indignation with the news headlines; then they move on with their lives. Killing knows no providence.

To make it clear — on a micro level, both Jewish and Palestinian peoples (and any other peoples for that matter) can co-exist (and have the right to co-exist) more justly without the machine of the state (Israeli, Palestinian, or any other form of state), and without the tools of conflict. The abolition of all states is the only avenue to justice, liberty, and fraternity. Ultimately the existence of any state means the oppression of those whom it perceives as threatening it, or acting against its interests, and, indeed, its own citizens.