by John
So, the fascist regime wants to position itself to become a major arms exporter, to
feed the horror and distress of military conflict around the world. Its concern
about export to oppressive countries is a furphy, a way of positioning itself
as righteous in exporting to the apparently ‘better’ countries, countries more
efficient at screening their human rights abuses.
Australia
hungers for power, and the constant papers and addresses to position itself as an
influential ‘middle power’ are part of the same mentality that denies
human-induced climate change, sees the remaining native vegetation and wildlife
as something to delete or at best fetishise, something that stands in the way
of ‘development’.
It’s tragic
being inside this most nineteenth-century political and psychological
immaturity — a game of states and borders, of power deals made by elites with
vested interests in their outcomes. Australia is not decolonising; it’s
recolonising and extending its ambitions into becoming a coloniser in overt and
subtle ways. Arms exports are the most brutal form of colonisation.
This goes
hand in hand with the abuse of refugees, of ‘turning back the boats’, of refusing
to scrutinise the ‘fuck off we’re full’ or ‘if you don’t like it, leave’
mentality that rules in much of rural Australia, and in the suburbs as well.
One of the
most appalling notions underlying so much of this pocket battleship aggression,
this dreadnought hangover of the years leading to the First World War, is that
of ‘any job being better than no job’. We hear this being peddled by
politicians of the right over and over again. So, to manufacture arms that are
used to kill is a just way of making a living?
There
aren’t even semantics worth undoing here to show the blatant hypocrisy of such
unreasoning ‘pragmatism’. The mining industry hugely benefits from arms trade,
and all the ‘philanthropy’ of rapacious miners buying off academic institutions,
and infiltrating the thinking and processing mechanisms of universities,
doesn’t change the fact that in the end they provide the raw materials of
bullets, guns, missiles, atomic warheads. The degrees of separation seem to
protect their consciences, but in the end, the corpses are at their doors, and
the doors of government.
Christopher
Pyne’s desire to position Australia as a 5 percenter in terms of defence
industry and sales is an overt fascist desire — the nation state develops and
fosters industries that entrench a militaristic identity in which we are all
expected to acquiesce or to be excluded.
There are
no real rights in Australia, just illusions of rights. They are taken from us
daily, and we do nothing. Australia already participates in the international
arms trade; don’t think it doesn’t. And this should be stopped immediately.
But things
are about to get a whole lot more bloody in the new patriotism stakes that are
being foisted on us. If this core of colonialism is not addressed, Australia
will consolidate its position as a New Colonial Power. For that’s what it is,
and why people can’t see the wood for the trees given most of its forest and
bush is being chopped down with nothing but dust in sight, chopped down and
burnt or logged and/or turned to woodchips; it’s an astonishing feat of denial.
But then again, note the sticker you see around here that supports the hunting
and fishing party: a gun with a tick, and a tree with a cross through it. Get
it, people?
