Against the Melbourne Arms Expo

It is encouraging to see many thousands actively resisting the arms expo in Melbourne. How things have changed. When a 'defence conference' was held in Perth some years ago only a handful of activists made any effort at all to speak out against it. The destruction of Gaza is the prompt, as it should be, but the war machine is grinding lives into slurry around the world in many different ways. There's the obvious hegemony-threatening horror of the war in (and out of) Ukraine, and the straightforward violation of human dignity and rights by Russian imperialism, but also the complication of that war by Western arms manufacturers clearly benefiting from the conflict (so little will to demand peace). 

The Ukraine-Russia war has become a bizarre 'settled thing' — a semi-accepted state of being in which subtleties of capitalism and despotism ride the waves of 'fortune'. For those injured and dying, it leaves nothing. 

The ongoing assault by the Israeli state against Palestine is not only an offence against humanity and the very essence of justice, it is one increasingly and passionately opposed by many Israelis themselves. The world's failure to stop these horrors is a shared one — too many benefit from arms sales and prosper under 'peace through power'. It's a case of 'working from home' or sub-contracting the responsibility for killing to others, and being able to go about one's daily 'business'.  

These conflicts must be stopped by a collective show of civil disobedience and non-compliance. We need a peaceful completionism that says we will stop these grotesque wrongs NOW and, further, we will keep resisting the industries and their war-thinking when these specific abuses are ended. I have frequently noticed that the passion for protest diminishes once something has been 'achieved', but it cannot stop for in reality it is rarely ever achieved. An end to these conflicts will not mean an end to the suffering, inequity and injustice. Only by stopping the manufacture and use of ALL weapons in all circumstances will those suffering be given hope, the dead respected, and the living given their best chance to continue living.

Here's a poem for all living things. It is a poem that intends to speak to humanity about its inhumanity.

Graphology Superscription 71

Dead Sea sparrow flees
across scripts, speech. 

Swifts call themselves
back to the Wailing Wall,

crossing such different
belief systems, psychologies.

Quail live in Israel
and Palestine, and feel

sacred in themselves.
A lesser whitethroat

flew from Lithuania
and was netted, ring

on its leg. It wasn’t shot
down, only captured.

Release is semi-conditional.
What goes on above

and below ground;
the weight of bones 
in flight.

John Kinsella