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

Poem for All Those Suffering from the Violence in the 'Middle East'

When One Is on the Verge of Leaving the World

When one is on the verge of leaving this world

the stresses on the atmosphere are increasing,

and the war-makers gloat over their annihilations

and many others die quicker than it takes for 

your own death to complete its cycle, even when

it’s ‘mini-stroke’ after ‘mini-stroke’ and you’ve 

only got one eye to the world. In the time between 

emergency and operation, in the time blood 

pressure drops critically in ICU to be persuaded 

to rise but not rise too far, the killers have killed 

so many others, with or without ‘pre-existing

conditions’ (other than living), and some repairing

from ailments, others just finding a way through

to dawn. These lives all terminated, these lives

burnt in the name of other lives and also to show-

case hardware, to make an exhibition of power.

When one is on the verge of leaving this world,

bushland is replaced by a playing field on which

a ball moves between profiles, the slices of life.

John Kinsella

Who Can Justify This?

 Who Can Justify This?

 

Kids carrying kids out of the rubble

of a bombed building is the brutal image

of tenderness we need and don’t need to see.

 

All images gather into deluges of images,

even if it’s a dry flattened landscape. Image piled

on image — the rubble of figurative language.

 

The kid carrying the kid out of the rubble:

quickening heart synched with faltering

heart, entangled in the materials of building.

 

The ‘justification’ behind the attack

leaves kids carrying kids out of the rubble.

The constructions of war; the idiom

 

for kids carrying kids out of the rubble

            of bombed buildings.

 

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

Poem Pleading for Peace in Israel and Palestine

Elegy

Cinnyris osea, who called you 

when the day died?

Palestinian sunbird, 

bird of aspiration.

Bird annihilated sheen 

of blue-green feather-film

foraging in dry air 

and we hear you under 

these conditions, an intense

yearning for an end 

to all violence between peoples. 

Co-existence

and curve-billed sampling

of flowers which are music,

which are conversations,

which love all people

more or less the same.

Cinnyris osea, who 

called you out of the sun

when the day died?

Palestinian sunbird, call peace

over Israel and Palestine,

out of the stones. Quickly. Please.

John Kinsella

Note: the Palestinian sunbird (beautiful bird) is the national bird of Palestine (the declaration goes: because it flies across borders to link Palestinian territories). It became the national bird in 2015 due to the Israeli authorities trying to remove 'Palestine' from its naming.

Pride/Christopher Street Day March in Tübingen

We're just back from attending the Pride/Christopher Street Day March around the streets of the Old Town in Tübingen. It was a powerful, peaceful and joyful occasion, 'awash' with rainbows in their different iterations. Thousands marched. Interestingly, Tracy and I were among a very small number of 'older people' who marched, but given this is a university town, that's probably not surprising. But it would have been nice to see a few more of our generation showing their support. Plenty watched on from the sidelines.

As the violence of the war in Ukraine shatters lives and communities on a vast scale, and threatens so many others, this was a demonstration of what peace, love, tolerance and respect might bring. It was worth noting a committed political 'intersectionalism' present across the procession, with anti-capitalist and anti-fascist flags, songs and mantras echoing out between the buildings. We always accept these in their peaceful iterations. For us, anarchism and peace are inseparable, and we support only pacifist approaches to even complex problems. And joy, camaraderie, community, and the peaceful benefits and inclusiveness of 'queer revolution' sang to us.

Though different groups represented different political and communal aspects of the queer community, there seemed an overwhelming sense that the exploitation, greed, profit and oppression that arise from capitalism, which is so readily yoked to various versions of fascism (in overt and hidden guises), need to be resisted. Capitalism and climate change. Capitalism and arms production. Capitalism and inequality. To link identity, gender and sexual liberty with a move away from the selfishness of capital and power/hierarchies seems essential to us. I am not speaking for all marchers, of course, but that's just one strong impression we took with us as we walked with the community.

What was equally refreshing about the march is that such unity spreads a sense of safety through the communities which we hope will endure. Only a couple of weekends ago, the inaugural Christopher Street Day March in the neighbouring city of Reutlingen was violated by anti-gay counter-protesters who extended their rightwing bigotry to violence and attacked marchers after the parade. It was so important for community to come together today to show such violence will be resisted by increasing presence, by affirming rights, and by denying it any say in how people are or will be. We send our support to those who were assaulted in Reutlingen, and stand by the LGBQTI+ community in every way. Further, we send our respects to the organisers of the march and other events celebrating queerness in all its manifestations, and further out from Tübingen to the world, where minorities suffer egregiously. In solidarity. 

Here are some images from today (taken by Tracy):

And by way of saying farewell, I add a 'sonnet' I wrote the other day after being yelled at in the street. It says something, I think:

Shout

I am walking from the bus stop to the flat

when a couple of 'young blokes' passing

in a car slow down and shout abuse at

me. I turn and study them — curving

around a corner they slow further

and shout again. I shake my head and disappear

down a lane-way, wondering if I will

find them waiting at the other end.

This happens to me around the world

for no obvious reason. I don't get their angle.

This weekend Tracy and I will march

in the Pride Parade to show our support —

there have been harassments and counter-marches

by conservatives here. We will sing but won't shout.

John Kinsella

Poems Against War: A 'Journal' from Childhood and Teenage Years

War Games

1. Fort — Da!

The two ‘nature-loving’ boys set up fort

by laying branches across the apertures

between old wandoos — a clump

of trees on the middle of the paddock.

We — the ‘war boys’ — didn’t

expect it, trekking across open territory,

heading for the cover of the Top Bush:

the wandoos a safe place to munch

biscuits we’d packed before

leaving the farmhouse. It was

a strategic position because contours

and firebreaks took you right

past it — the paddock a killing

zone, all lines of sight and minefields,

thin green crop only up a month...

walk through there and there’d

be hell to pay. Looks are deceptive.

We’d let down our guard, coming

up to our ‘safe place’, but truth is

it’d long been a contested space:

the others liked to listen to the parrots

cavorting overhead. There’d once been

an echidna working termites in a hollowed

log. Large insects worked shadowy bark.

And so when we fell to the hail

of clods — boondies

mud peppered with gravel,

the upturnings of the plough

where wheat hadn’t set at the edges —

maybe we shouldn’t have been startled.

This was an aggressive environmentalism

we’d guessed might be possible, but

had rejected as being out of all

proportion. Brother to brother,

cousin to cousin, the hail

came from the peace-lovers,

while it was we, in our fatigues,

who yelled louder than the tractor

straining through boggy ground:

Not fair not fair! This is all wrong.

(ii)

A statement I am still

trying to work out

over forty years

later as I pass

another sign

pointing to the remnants

of an ancient Celtic hill fort,

so attractive to the invaders

long after.

                   And on Wheatlands farm,

it was alliances between Celt and Saxon

and Celt on restless, hyperventilating land.

Alliances against the ‘wild Aborigines’

who we knew must come with spears

and vengeance. Why wouldn’t they?

Ambush: Latin to French to English.

I don’t know the Noongar word.

What right do I have to the devices

of language, the codes

of resistance?

What right to remember

what I remember.

The era, childhood,

the legacies,

2.  Scale Models

Airfix. Miniature. To scale.

Bedroom festooned

with armour, bristling

with tanks and anti-tank

guns — terrain & camouflage.

Leopard tanks, Shermans,

Centurions. Catalogue.

Library. Firepower.

Amassing strength.

Deflecting shells.

Blitzkrieg a-political

masculine word choice.

I’d tried everything else

I could think of. I didn’t

believe in destiny

though I feared fate.

3. ‘I don’t want to play wars.’

Said my younger brother

as I flung Cape lilac berries

at his head. Me, kitted

out in constructor’s safety

helmet, home-made ‘rifle’,

backpack and ammo pouches.

I had fought many enemies

and triumphed but there

was no body count

outside my head.

I needed independent

verification of casualties:

at least one ‘severely wounded’

who might be treated: I carried

a genuine first aid kit.

This was the path to being a general.

My father had nothing to do with it,

being ‘Up North’ and having

done his time in Nashos —

‘character-building’,

served with Graham ‘Polly’ Farmer,

missed Korea and Vietnam

as the timeline unwound.

4. Movies

Primed in black & white, Saturday arvo

war movies on wet winter days — quagmire,

trenches, bogged down in Audie Murphy.

So obsessive, I spent the time spotting

inconsistencies in weaponry, uniforms,

ordnance — historical anomalies,

being in possession of the facts,

the truth, as I was.

                                  Don’t argue

with me — do your research, mate.

I saw the colour of the battlefield,

never the colour of the blood.

5. Purnell’s History of the Second World War

Purnell’s every Saturday morning for a year

ordered through the local newsagency.

And more. All going smoothly in the fields

of death, campaigns across the steppes,

Battle of the Coral Sea, Fortress Europe.

Then the Holocaust Issue. Then silence.

No wars for the week. No recreating

battlefields in bedrooms. No self-control

to make general staff material.

And I was too young to read Celan

and find a way through poetry.

I was too old to want to die

in the trenches.

6. War Games

Strategy games. Too old to kill each other in the backyard,

the mind wants more — campaigns, scenarios, turning

the tides of history. The SS Death’s Head Division

a black counter on the hexagon of country, terrain.

Attack strength, defence strength, capacity

for movement even when supplies

are in short supply on the front elsewhere.

Clinical as reading Wilfred Owen at school

and perfectly understanding the poetic effect

of horror. The slips between writing and reading,

taking orders and giving orders. Who said,

‘Different wars...’ or ‘Every war is different...’

No one, I hope, no one. Though I imagine

it’s likely, and I thought it back then.

7. Debate

Reading Clausewitz On War and Guderian’s Achtung! — Panzer

(the allies didn’t charge him after the war and he was valorised

as an acceptable incarnation of the elite soldier... something

for those who love war as a human quality — deep in their souls —

to cling to) and Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico

and Sun Tzu ur-text The Art of War, I was a full bottle

on why wars are: inevitable, necessary, desirable.

I am — point blank — too humiliated to recount

the details of my argument, and unwilling to hide

behind the smokescreen: ‘I was given that side

of the debate... the rules, the art-form, the discipline...’

qualities I have no belief in now, and probably not then.

And the Head Girl, taking the side for peace,

argued with as much passion against war

as I did for. A professional cool, a studied vehemence

was my guiding light.  And the war-loving boys

who made my life hell — physical and sexual

and psychological abuse — looking on

to see their future commander in action!

I could tell them that Master Sun said...

‘Exploit the enemy’s dispositions

     To attain victory’

But the spies among my own team

sold me out — a pathetic specimen

to lead the assault,

conduct their war.

     John Kinsella