We already live in a militarised state here in Western Australia, with the Stirling Naval Base (it makes me iller than I already am just writing this name) and its 'key' role in the developing AUKUS nuclear submarine horror junket, but the latest effort of the Cook government (pseudo left-lite... essentially populist and not based on consensual politics in any real way) to create an 'arms industry hub' reaches new levels of appalling.
As much as 'overuse' of adjectives horrifies certain writing teachers, so too the underuse allows the militarists to push their way through to outcomes that serve their violent, profiteering orientations. Further, they make every use of propaganda methods that they can, from the 'subtle' behind the scenes approach, to the grand announcement designed to appeal to an imagined 'majority's' desires and 'requirements'.
Missiles are the key selling point because we have all seen the 'power' they have to rule from a distance, but this pitch to arms companies to tender for such a hub is 'inclusive'. Wars across the world serve to illustrate this, just as drone-manufacture and software have become a passport to trade viability.
When in 1956 G. E. M. Anscombe coined the term 'scare quotes' with reference to irony and specific usage in Aristotle's writings (see Mind: a Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy (VOL. LXV. NO. 267, January, 1956; p.3), she might have been more than aware of its Cold War and active war implications (but this is guesswork on my part). Scare quotes and adjectives can barely expose the brutality and shortsightedness of Premier Cook and his compadres' thinking in this, with even the lightest challenge from a press conference journalist asking if to create such a hub meant that he was happy to be an arms dealer, he replied that he saw himself as a 'jobs dealer' (though roughly direct representation of speech, this actually deserves no quote marks beyond an accusatory function).
The Perth Convention Centre we hear is heavily policed for this stanza (quote marks? my term...) of the Indian Ocean Defence and Security Conference, to ensure the war talk and arms dealing can go along without interruptions or too much visible opposition. We hear the police will intercept those approaching, we know that national media will play down questioning.
The Labor government sell of jobs, jobs, jobs has a corona of run-on employment about it: the threat of war creates work, and war itself demands everything (including control) of and over a community. The recent fossil fuel crisis (ongoing, as it can only ever be) has roused receptivity to fever-pitch susceptibility. Even the Tesla drivers yearn for the byproducts, just as Musk delivers his racist, polluting discourses via the SpaceX rockets and his broader industrialism. Yes, this is a conflation, but it's all about conflations. That's capitalism at full tilt... a martial metaphor. Oh, Tesla Cybertrucks are part of the 'targeting' program of the US military.
In the consumer-materialism of a 'resource rich' state (as they call Western Australia: scare quotes again but with a different inflection), such jobs obviously promise the sustaining of some lives at the expense of others. The translation of weapons into death is a far-away problem, until it isn't! And to heap more destructive pernicious corrosive and glib adjectives onto the whole, it is barely surprising that the town of Collie is being suggested as a feasible location for this arms hub.
We learn that as the workforce transitions from its focus on coal mining, jobs lost will be jobs found (hand in hand with tourism and the natural environment?). The hard labouring base of mining and all it evokes in class struggle workers' rights achievements, even if those struggles meant something very different and more 'positive' in the times when they were so fervently pursued, is exploited by the implied correlation that one dirty industry can easily translate into another. Now, some miners might feel this way, but I am sure many others won't (even if someone like me opposes their very work base in the first place due to the rampant ecological and climate damage it causes).
Human rights are human rights. Our histories might be different, but we need to start from a premise that we all deserve to live without direct or oblique threats. The arms industry is an industry of threat.
A personal note to all this, as it so directly affects the colonial gazetting I spend so much time in... I have been seriously ill of late and am hindered regarding what I can do in speaking out as this is happening, and I am hoping this short statement contributes to the groundswell of opposition. Missiles and mining, military vehicles and mining, first aid kits... and mining. These are binaries, they're part of the language of a conference that requires much ongoing background activity, and that defies anyone who contest its murderous reality.
In Australia each state and territory is manipulated as a synecdoche for the people within its voting catchment (of course). So when Western Australia (meaning the government and specific lobby groups) calls for missiles, it's 'the people' who 'want them' because jobs mean not only sustaining one's own life (and family), but also destructively enhancing 'prosperity' through consumerism. Individuals and families destroyed by these activities (directly or indirectly), have no say and are not going to have a say in any way.
John Kinsella
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