State Violence and Hate

The violent actions of the NSW police force against those protesting the Israeli President's visit to Australia are on display for all to see. This record of police brutality is a grim reminder of how vulnerable human rights are to manipulation and abuse, as is the very fact of the presence of a war criminal in the social discourse of the broader community. 

Aligning the presence of one of the leaders of the Israeli war machine with the need to address people's deep distress about the horrific slaughter at Bondi risks contesting and erasing the fact of the destruction and genocide in Gaza. This serves no form of justice for anyone. If this person were acting as a 'private citizen' mourning personal loss, a case might be made for a private visit even in the fallout of his being a 'signatory' to the crimes of the Israeli state, but this visit was hardly ever (just) about that. He comes as the war criminal he is, supported by the state.

It seems clear that the reality of anti-semitism being the driver of the Bondi massacre cannot and should not be negated by defining it as an extension of the conflict in Gaza. To do so is to excuse the inexcusable, to negate the humanity and agency of each murdered individual, and to offer a pathway for justifying the heinous. 

The acts of the NSW police fit the pattern of state control, and the refusal to offer a right of protest against a figure identified directly with slaughter, coming as a representative of a war machine that has so far escaped any real scrutiny and consequences for its genocidal actions, is such a disturbing mixing of registers of suffering that it offends basic human rights. Bigotry — be it anti-semitic or anti-Palestinian — is the bloody divider between oppression and justice. 

Having spent a life resisting fascism, often enduring death threats and even beatings in my younger years, I find any attempt to rationalise murder and violence as justice absolutely unsupportable. The shift from colonial aggression into 'decolonising' aggression is a contradiction so easily presented as the 'real' form of activism, as opposed to declaration that all forms of violence are wrong. There is too much manipulation and control going on across discourses that seek justice by trying to render void other ways of seeing (by which I mean non-violent ways of seeing and dealing with wrongs)... an aggressive censorship that would remove all opposition around pathways to peace and justice.  

We are sadly dealing with what amounts to a new racism - a racism that refuses the label as part of its process, and that justifies itself in the context of resisting what it perceives as an indefensible racism (which it is, of course) ... resulting in more hate and a deepening racism. Semantics can't alter that fact that ALL racism is wrong. 

I personally stand for all those who are oppressed and all those who are harmed. Even the oppressors don't deserve harm — what they need is to be prevented from causing harm and to be shown a way past their own hate and bigotry. Disarming in the material reality as well as in thought is a start. We must all hold violent policing to account and the state and policing system that would justify the violation of basic human rights all in the name of thwarting hatred. The irony is deadly and a negation of human rights. 

Hate is the word of our age only because it is underwritten by histories and stories of hate. 

John Kinsella

In Support of the Indigenous Community at the Boorloo Invasion Day Rally Who Were 'Allegedly' (legal/press jargon) Attacked, and in Support of All Indigenous Peoples

Sidestepping

 

Outside the GPO,

Boorloo/Perth.

Midday.

 

Who wants to call

a meeting space

‘Forrest Place’?

 

Site of non-violent

resistance

to settler

thinking.

 

Invasion Day gathering

to affirm the rights

and spirit

of First Nations people.

 

I cross the overpass

from the railway

station, descend

the escalator

 

and walk adjacent

to where, a week ago,

the attacker threw

an improvised

 

explosive device

encased in a Disney sock —

into the heart

of the crowd.

 

Racist nationalism

is the slow emergence

of cause while

continuing its effect.

 

The unexploded

that reaches

and keeps reaching

for casualties,

 

for aftershocks.

Walking adjacent

I try not to sidestep

the distress.

 

 

            John Kinsella

For the People of Iran

 

BABA TAHER

Baba Taher (1000-1075?), also known as Oryaan

(the Naked) is recognised as one of the first poets

of mystical love, later known as Sufism, in modern

Persian. Very little is known about his life other than

his being originally from the city of Hamadan, 

where he is also buried. He is best known for his 

lyrical doe-bayt (two verse) quatrains.

Translated by Ali Alizadeh and John Kinsella (taken from Six Vowels and Twenty Three Consonants: An Anthology of Persian Poetry from Rudaki to Langroodi, ed. Ali Alizadeh and John Kinsella)

Supporting Writers Who Have Withdrawn from Adelaide Festival

There is no room for censorship of the arts, not ever. We are a community of difference/s, and communities of difference are necessary to creating safe, just and caring communities at large. Nor is there ever a supportable reason for cancelling, as the New South Wales government has done, the right to protest, to marching for a cause in a peaceful way. Shutting down conversation does not bring healing.

And I also want to voice our complete opposition to the actions of the Trump administration in attacking Venezuela under its 'Donroe' doctrine of western imperialism, its abuse of the land and people in its oil theft and usage, and its blatant attempt to enact yet another colonialism on the people of Greenland. One does not have to search very hard to find Australian undercurrents in the mining grab for Greenland rare earth and uranium deposits. In all of this we are dealing with a growing capitalist oppression, exploitation and tyranny.

John Kinsella

On the Killings at Bondi, Sydney, and in Providence, Rhode Island

We wish to send our support and care to all those who were injured or affected by the massacre at Bondi Beach and to remember those who were killed.

We also wish to send our support in the same way to those affected by the mass shooting in Providence, where we have dear friends. As I was writing to my friend Kwame Dawes, he was experiencing what was happening at his place of teaching. It was horrific.

 

It is deeply distressing to see political point-scoring taking place when people are suffering such physical pain and emotional trauma. What is obvious is that psychologies of hatred lead to death and misery, and that bigotry has many manifestations. The availability of weapons is a disgrace, and until a central part of the discussion becomes the complete disarming of the world in all capacities — private, military, individual, nation-states and so on — then hatred will find its means of inflicting the most harm it can.

 

Regarding the massacre targeting Jewish people celebrating their faith at Bondi, it is brutally insensitive and bigoted to correlate this with what has happened in the destruction of Gaza. Both are crimes. Both deserve to be understood for the indefensible crimes they are. It seems to me even inappropriate to draw them together in this lament, but others are doing so, will do so, and the situation will be manipulated to suit different agendas and beliefs. But people have died. People have had their loved ones taken from them. Community has been shattered. Our care should be for every person lost, every person affected, and for the broader community. This cannot happen. We are all culpable for failing to nuance social interactions on broader scales to help play down aggression while remaining committed to just causes. Life is the most just of causes, and life has been taken. Every person of Jewish heritage in Australia will feel threatened and vulnerable. This matters. This cannot be, any more than it can be the case for people/s of any heritage.

 

The objectionable correlation of Jewishness with the behaviour of the Israeli military state has become a mode of bigoted convenience for anti-Semites — that’s obvious to anyone who is active in pro-Palestinian causes. To support the Palestinian people does not equate to being anti-Jewish, and yet for some it is a contradictory vehicle for their own hatred. The focus on ‘race’ rather than heritage, on ideology rather than faith, has led to disturbing divisions in the common humanity we all share. We are all humans, we all wish to live decolonised lives, we all wish to survive without physical threat. To kill is the most colonial of acts. Colonialism occurs in shadow as well as overt ways. A murder is a murder.

 

So, our love and care to all those affected and damaged. Society’s purpose is to be non-violent. It’s the world’s purpose, too. Let’s start now. Totally.

 

Proliferating Elegies

 

And this morning we woke

to hear of friends at risk

in Providence, of a scene

unfolding, of a live situation

when there were already deaths.

Across the curve of the world

the news — we are safe

but it is still happening.

The heat was rising

and I went outside

to feel how heavy

the air was already.

Before the storm arrived

I saw a kookaburra

with lightning draped

from its beak. I have written

to seven people over

the last twenty years

to see if they’ve survived

mass shootings.

 

We read that it had been a beautiful day in Sydney

while it was storming here, fire in the forest.

Then people were crying and calling

across time zones, unable

to reach the end of day. We stretch

out a hand as lightning reaches

inside the house into us.

We talk in the dark, waiting

for the lights to come back on.

We learn that the killers

were father and son — that

one of them had held a gun

licence for ten years. That he

had six weapons, all legal,

all accounted for. A father

and son who went to work

killing. A spree. A targeting.

Organised, specific. A ‘mass

casualty’ event. Their family

home is being raided to find

details, to find evidence

for what remains. The hospitals

are full, transfusions

taking place. The sea tests

the beach, as always, as always.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Poem in memory of Mags Webster

By Tracy Ryan

Another Persephone

 

There are too many.

Daughterly, you leave us,

still picking flowers,

descend not gingerly

but all at once

before we realise.

Darkness never knew

one so luminous,

flourishing, in each hand like

torch, like blossom, a poem –

our bond was through

poetry only and yet

I take this personally:

that Hades dares

to think he has you,

could quench that glow,

a voice no chthonic

silence could swallow.

 

Out of bleak earth, the bloom.

On Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot (UQP, 2025)

'The girlshaped thing' refuses manhandling in the rejection of imperial capital and the affirmation of those whose lives are unable to complete themselves because of colonial tyranny. It's a bookwork of wounds which refuses platitudes of repair. As capitalist militarism works to remove agency from the world, Evelyn Araluen rewrites the corrupt circuitry to insist on a poetics of justice. It seeks to staunch the flow of blood from wounds inflicted by global capital. This bookwork is the next move in the erosion of the oppressive state apparatus, a move that will, with support and persistence, take us into the classless, just and equitable world we know should be all of ours. Respect for Country is absolute, as is the personhood of all those who are denied rights by aggressive capital. This is a bookwork that has the scale, intensity, linguistic versatility and critical acuity to become a turning point, a marker in the commitment to repair the damage. Alive with the tension between information and psychology, between the journal and the anti-lyric, The Rot is a pathway we might all share, might all take while questioning the consequences of our every step. This is a bookwork for the 'girls' that reroutes confessional poetry into public discourse. Out of personhood we acquire responsibility, and herein we feel the fragments of hauntings that not only look back, but to what they will be and become. This is a bookwork that shatters any preconceptions about 'poetry and form' and 'poetry and theme': the language morphs to avoid capitalist fetishisation and meaning becomes increasingly intricate as it arcs back to stark realities, absolute truths. An unforgettable journey that not only leaves its own marks of protest but clarifies the poison of archival erasure while questioning the manipulation by the state and capital of the  archive itself, exposing the rot of empire. The Rot is a set of points we might move through and find a way to justice.

 

            John Kinsella, in a place made safe for the possums