The Indian Ocean Defence and Security Conference and the Government's Call for an Arms Hub in Western Australia

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

No Nuclear Submarines No Matter Who Owns Them! For a Nuclear-free World! For a Weapons-free World!

And where have all the anti-nuclear peace protesters gone?

Apexing

 

As the propaganda

unfurls to make a complaisant

audience even more pliable,

we hear of the unsighted

sonar world of insight

into the call of whales,

the sea creature speech

that is a privilege to eavesdrop

on, to warm the soul

the deeper and colder

it gets. ‘Brothers and sisters’

in the new regime, precise

as torpedoes, concise

as thirty-second showers,

intimate as cramped

living conditions in which

‘sex’ is off the menu (‘steak

and lobster’ is on). The massaging

of reception as the Virginia-class

fast-attack submarine USS Minnesota

slips in to ease the transfer

of nuclear reactors

so friendly to oceans

and surface, to all that earth

is and will no longer be.

Rockingham hugs the ‘apex

predator’, Fremantle hugs

the apex predator, Perth

hugs the apex predator.

Don’t call these places

by their Indigenous names

in such a context as this —

those names are forever

and not temporary.

Where have the protesters

gone? Where have the flotillas

of peace boats sailed? As easy

as economics the safety

of world as we know it in

back yards, front yards, down

the street, across the water,

high up in the tainted atmosphere.

 

 

            John Kinsella

On Modes of Protest — a letter regarding collective responses

On the need for collective, co-ordinated responses (to crimes against humanity, specifically the war on the people of Gaza): ...’only’ that peaceful interventions should (to my mind) be made in all possible contexts and that we need to speak to people to bring 'them' on board with addressing situations rather than entrench 'them' as enemies. I strongly believe that peace (in all contexts) can only come about by the privileging of open conversation, to show that human rights also involve the consciences of those who violate them and those consciences need addressing. As a pacifist, I am on the path of total disarmament (of all), and I think that empathy is core to change. At present there is no concrete world language of empathy outside a few individuals and groups — no means of translating different cultural values, lived experience, heritage  etc, into a comparative model so people generally understand difference as something necessary and inherent rather than something that poses a threat. That such rights are essential beyond all else. For me, the apparent total non-protest and the apparent lack of civil disobedience around Australia's militarisation (or, rather, its dramatic upscale from a force of colonial oppression to one with colonial-imperial designs) is entangled with all the other oppressions it overtly or inadvertently supports. So, really, I argue for a holistic approach to protest — we cannot hope to effectively help stop genocide in Gaza while the very basis of our lives in Australia is entrenched in the legacies of genocide itself, and future projections of this (via the realities of AUKUS and the like). We need to protest empathetically, persistently, emphatically (non-violently) and holistically and not in bits and pieces. A concerted but non-belligerent approach. Many will disagree with this, and see belligerence as essential, but in my life of enacting and participating in protest, I have found belligerence to be ineffective. Being emphatic and persistent — never giving in — is a different thing from 'belligerence'.

            John Kinsella

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.

 

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