Role Models and Veganism

        by John Kinsella

 

I have been thinking a lot about possible correlatives between becoming a vegan in the mid-1980s and the difficulty for woman artists to find creative role models in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But further, I am thinking of how any oppressive system determines the manner in which information is passed on, how it’s taught. Reading the Roxana Robertson biography of Georgia O’Keeffe (Georgia O’Keeffe: A life, Bloomsbury, London, 2020) brings this particularly to mind, especially her citing of Gilbert and Gubar:

 

‘It was difficult for a woman at that time to become a painter: there was little precedent. In examining the difficulties women had in becoming writers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have pointed out the importance of the role of the predecessor. ‘That writers assimilate then consciously or unconsciously affirm or deny the achievements of the predecessors is, of course, a central fact of literary history.’ The same can be said of painters.’ (p78)

 

So, I am interested in how one makes a radical departure from within the power structures one is embedded in and controlled by (especially schooling) when there are few precedents and predecessors for such a decision in one’s social milieu. This is an issue of role models (and Tracy has pointed me towards Albert Bandura’s social learning theory, which I will start working with, and also Dale Spender on foremothers). Feminist identifying and dismantling of patriarchal controls seem deeply relevant and generative to me; as diverse as feminism necessarily is, this basic drive to act outside the oppression, to act with personal and collective volition, is a vital model. Where and where I can’t intersect with that with regard to veganism is something I will consider further, always acknowledging the work of Carol J. Adams.

 

In my case, being an ‘outsider’ from much culture when I was young predisposed me towards different thinking and different behaviour, as it does for anyone alienated by mainstream acculturation. But though I rejected many of the social models around me, I was necessarily influenced by them and had to interact and respond to them in everything I did. Even being alone had consequences for re-interfacing with what one had stepped out of. This predisposition to act differently from social norms is one of necessity and choice, but choice is very limited when there’s no one to talk with about what you’re feeling and thinking.

 

Yes, there were vegetarians, and they encouraged me to become a vegetarian in the first place, especially given my political beliefs around patriarchy and oppressive systems of control. Choose to be different and to be ethical, was the argument. A further predisposition was enhanced by having been in India and come across Jains, and having been impressed with their dignity and commitment of belief. But I wasn’t ‘even’ vegetarian then. I didn’t know any Jain personally, and had no model to base my actions on.

 

In some ways, back in Australia, being around vegetarians in the communal situation I lived in was very antithetical to veganism, because they saw no reason for veganism. Their attitude to veganism was not intended as an oppression, but as a role model their lacto-ovo vegetarianism was limiting for me. Yet that was mild compared to the abreaction of the rest of the community! Six months after becoming vegetarian I became vegan (along with two others who did not remain so) while living in a house on a dairy farm. Understanding more than I had the anti-life cycle of a dairy cow (despite life-long connections with farms), really led to a sudden and abrupt change, one made without models or precedents in any real sense, just from shock and being affronted. Maybe the ability to continue being a committed vegan in the early days was reinforced by having two others who were also vegan around me, but I am sure it ultimately made no difference — it was a decision made because I felt no choice.

 

But what I am interested in is how, with very little if any ‘guidance’, one is empowered to break away from social norms. Yes, being alienated on many levels before such a decision will make such a decision ‘easier’, but that’s not it, really. And though we act alone, it’s not just a decision of the self because if you commit your life to a difference stance, it’s going to be noticed in many obvious and also subtle ways. Your decision is going to affect others, even by implication, and they are going to react in many ways. In 80s and 90s the reactions were frequently oppressive and sometimes threatening. Now, less so; much less so. In fact, there are so many models that veganism is familiarised even in wheat and sheep farming areas of Western Australia. It may be considered inimical, but it’s an accepted reality. It may be mocked, but it is acknowledged.

 

When I became vegan, I found the meat-eating norm highly oppressive. I found it difficult to understand why people harassed me for being vegan when I was not making incursions into their lives, their eating, their customs. Why was my stance a threat to them? It’s difficult to express the extent of the passive and overt aggression that I (and we) experienced in those ‘early days’. It made one search for precedents and models where there had been none. And that’s how I came across the history of The Vegan Society and its co-founder Donald Watson... founded in 1944 in Britain... in wartime Britain, which made me think a lot about animals and war, and then about pacifism in general.

 

The Vegan Society had nothing directly to do with my pacifism, but the fact that the society arose during the Second World War brought things into alignment for me. Veganism and pacifism seemed intrinsic to each other. Watson was a conscientious objector, though I didn’t know that when I first came across The Vegan Society. And though this was no role model, it was a comfort. Not discovering this ‘Western’ precedent within a colonial-capitalist matrix — from within the core of the colonial horror — would have made no difference to my continuing to be vegan, but it brought that sense of connectedness that helps sustain inner wellbeing: not reassurance, but less aloneness. And in this I have been very lucky with Tracy as a partner for twenty-eight years, and a family deeply understanding and connected with veganism. We are ongoing models to each other.

 

Anyway, these are incipient thoughts... notes towards a longer essay about systems of oppression and how we break out of them, with or without models. And if we lack overt models, how do we find traces of earlier resistance we might connect to, so as to sustain our mental wellbeing in a life of committed difference for an ethics we believe in?

 

 

Vegan Rights in Prison (on the denial of vegan food to a vegan animal rights activist in a Western Australian prison)

This kind of abuse by the state, and its punitive arms, that targets and oppresses those who practise ethical abstention from meat-eating, is of the same order as a long history of oppressions against difference. Unless all of us, no matter what attitudes held toward veganism, stand up for people’s rights to be fed and clothed in a manner that accords with their deep-held beliefs — such as people who object to the usage and exploitation of animals — it is akin to disrespecting different cultural practice or religious belief. It is different, and it is the same. To leave someone to starve because they refuse to eat meat, or foods affected by meat, is a denial of life rights, and will one day be seen as the extreme persecution it is. We stand by this peaceful protester’s rights of choice, and whatever someone’s perceived crimes are, to deny them their rights of conscience is to deny them their humanity. If prisons and authorities treat people like this, it’s on a continuum with how animals are treated. Such deliberate deprivation is hate on a level that all should condemn, whatever their beliefs.

And as for the far-right West Australian newspaper and its aggressive and provocative coverage of the issue — the use of ‘notorious’ and ‘vegan’ in the same article speaks of their agenda of exploitation, violence and oppression.

Here are some links on approaches to the rights of vegans in prison in the UK; the second is a general page at the UK Vegan Society which includes a link to their booklet on providing vegan food for both prisoners and staff.

https://www.plantbasednews.org/post/thousands-uk-prisoners-eat-vegan-christmas

https://www.vegansociety.com/take-action/campaigns/catering-everyone/prisons

John Kinsella

Veganism and Animal Rights, and Vigilantism and Farming Communities in Western Australia

I sent this letter to the Western Australian Police Commissioner and the Premier of Western Australia early last week. I want to add that the W.A. mainstream media coverage of veganism and animal rights issues in Western Australia has generally been rabid and paranoid, and part of a disturbing far-right stirring of nationalism that aims for aggressive suppression of any challenge to the industry.

Dear Police Commissioner

I wish to protest the ‘support’ given by police (as seen in today’s news) to a member of the public who discharged a weapon near people who were filming animals on his property. The moment the use of a weapon in any capacity is given the okay, you have opened the door to injury or worse — advertent or inadvertent.

I have no connection to the activists in question; I do not know them.

To side with the animal farmers against the vegan animal rights activists is not the police’s remit — the police’s remit is to uphold the law. There is no room for moral intrusion in this process — you cannot take sides. Doing so contributes to polarising and hardening differences, rather than helping toward understanding.

Activists’ intrusions can be legally dealt with according to law — and should the activists wish to change things, they need to work to change the laws. No one should feel threatened in this.

One could argue that animals’ rights are part of this as well, and I would, but I recognise that until laws are changed there are ways to go about these things that respect people as well as animals. No doubt. But not to charge someone using a weapon in the vicinity of people no matter how enraged, or even if the weapon-user feels ‘threatened’, is unacceptable by the laws you yourself uphold.

I have been a vegan for approximately thirty-three years, and my wife for twenty-five years, and we live in the wheatbelt. We live alongside others amicably, which doesn’t mean we all always agree on everything. Ours is not to bully or cajole others, but to live our lives decently and offer an example of a different way of living on the planet. Many have been influenced by our choices, not because we have bullied them, but because we haven’t. As such, animals benefit as well.

It is not right to threaten, deride, or humiliate others in any circumstances, even if one feels they are doing wrong. It’s s slippery slope in both directions.

So I would ask you to stand up against vigilantism and respect non-aggressive vegans and animal rights people as much as you do those who farm animals, and certainly more than those who are armed and make threats (and yes, wielding firearms around people is a form of threat).

Police actions in this have made us feel vulnerable, as if farmers are being encouraged into aligning against vegans, and we shouldn’t have to feel that way. We don’t make others feel vulnerable, and are known to respect difference. Your job surely is to uphold the law, and not to cast judgement.

Sincerely,

John Kinsella

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The Nature/Nurture Propaganda of New-Wave Taxidermists

            by John Kinsella

Window Shopping at the Taxidermist’s

The permeable glass — sieve-like — drains
the liquid light, a fluid more precious
than formaldehyde, the smell of life …
A grimace or a grin stretches like a trap,
and as a backdrop a deer dispenses
with its claim to needing a heart,
it’s only there from the neck up,
though its eyes are sharp, senses finely
tuned, nervousness held in check
through a familiarity born of sharing
a display case with a pack of wolves.
The window shoppers hunt amongst the grime
of the city’s unglamorous side, their prey
the glimmering skin, the combed and shining —
here they show their skill, knowing
where to bag the finest trophy.

I wrote the above poem in 1992 and it was published in my 1993 volume, Full Fathom Five. I am pretty sure I wrote it at the base of the Darling Scarp, though it’s actually ‘about’ a piece of taxidermy seen elsewhere, maybe in the northern hemisphere when I was twenty (though I am pretty sure it was triggered by seeing some taxidermy in a window in Northbridge, Perth). It is a poem-critique of a capitalist disrespect and abuse of the dead, and also, though only by implication as it is superficially ‘genderless’, of a patriarchy of trophyism.

Living in central Ohio in the early to mid 2000s, an excursion out into the region would take us past taxidermists’ shops — not rare in hunting territories. Some of the taxidermists prided themselves on ‘artistic flair’, ‘respect for nature’, and ability to deliver a ‘quality product’. If I recall correctly, at least one of these taxidermy businesses was run by a husband-and-wife team. Or am I wilfully misremembering? I don’t think so.

Taxidermy has haunted me since seeing, as a child, ‘specimens’ in the Perth Museum — what others might take as a point of inspiration, the seeding of a vocation, I took as disturbance. But though back then I was not a vegan, and not an animal rights activist, and in fact did hunt and fish, I found the ‘re-enactment’ side of the displays — the animating of the dead to give humans a sense of authenticity, to provide entertainment and ‘education’ in elements of the world that cannot be shown — hypocritical and dishonest.

To illustrate, to capture (again) the animals in a (faux) performative moment in their ‘native habitat’, was to mock their living, individual lives. To make the dead ‘live’, to make the temporariness of their lives (however ended or taken from them), quasi-‘permanent’, to arrest their being in such a manner, was grotesque to me. Their eyeballs seem particularly wrong. And in each case, little adornments of ‘place’ — a branch, a rock, a snake rising in the corner on real sand. It truly bothered me.

What brought this all back, suddenly, was seeing another article (one was run last year on that year’s instalment of the same taxidermy exhibition) on what we might term ‘new-wave taxidermy’. And though this is an interpolation, written after what follows, I would bring to mind Carol J. Adams’s question in The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Continuum, New York, 2000), ‘Where does vegetarianism end and feminism begin, or feminism end and vegetarianism begin?’ And consider her observation a few lines later: ‘Our meals either embody or negate feminist principles by the food choices they enact.’ (p. 178)

So new-wave taxidermists are wishing to get away from the word ‘taxidermy’? This is ‘art’! So they’re trying to get away from the ‘stuffy’ version of weird men in back rooms playing with animal corpses? So they’re trying to get away from the idea of dead animal ‘mounted’ as ‘trophy’?

Instead, we have a ‘gender’-angled promotion (as extension of arts-capitalism, not as an act of liberty and liberation) in which some women (especially younger women, it seems) are territorialising the realms of the dead. A reconvening of the underworld in which Persephone reclaims the space of body articulate in the domain of Hades. There’s an absurdity in this configuring, but the subtexts of the gender issues around the new-wave taxidermy, as conveyed by promotions and ‘teachers’ wishing to ‘modernise’ practice, are playing into these tropes. Don’t worry: all of this will suit those ‘stuffy’ male taxidermists and death fetishists very well indeed. Their kingdom grows through the process.

We read that we’ve gone (in Australia) from one woman over a decade ago (officially?) playing with dead animal corpses, to over fifty in the here and now. And now, it’s nurturing nature morte — bringing life to dead nature. The women are placing the animals in ‘natural settings’; they are bringing life to what is dead. A new fertility — a reclaiming of the birth of death. This, of course, is withering gendering discourse. It is setting women up as clichés and prisoners of the incubator, with a femininity (anxiety) so powerful it can re-animate the dead (as Dr Frankenstein succeeded in doing, but failed, as his creator Mary Shelley knew he must; or horror struggling with right-wingism in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction). This is a torturously constrained semantic display.

We read that to not understand this is because of our ignorance, because we don’t know how to read this new presentation of the living dead. We (male or female or non-binary) apparently need to be taught. We need to be educated in the aesthetics of displaying death, the rewriting of ethics through playing the ethics of gender (in)equality. The gender of the stuffed (!) animals becomes a variable in the display. Of the beauty of the fox (so hated in Australia) in its ‘natural’ environment (what, the Australian paddock, the Australian national park, or the vague ancestral memory of English fields?).

Such gendering of death-plays is destructive and demeaning, though probably not more than a non-gendered death display, but it’s not liberating in any way for humans or animals alike, and shouldn’t be claimed as such, outside the machinery of chromosome counts.

The abuse of dead animals to make nature ‘art’ is an abuse of the animal as subaltern — written into it is not only a politics of indifference and insensitivity, but a demeaning of women as process. Okay, if people are going to be exploiters of animal corpses — removing all sanctity and spirituality in death from their rights and rites, then they shouldn’t pretend it’s to do with redressing the grotesque and omnipresent social and personal wrongs of gender inequality and gender abuse. These are facts.

Women have no ‘equal’ status in any real terms, and need to constantly push in every context to redress this. Taxidermy is not an effective medium for this — in many ways, it’s the endgame of patriarchy. And if it is to become a medium to dismantle patriarchy, then it needs to be textual and abstracted, and not literal: that is, no real corpses used in the process!

To use death as a metaphor of rights, especially within the faux fertilities of reanimation and ‘art’ (and ‘design’), is a furphy, an advertising ploy, and capitalism’s happy incorporation of women into its consuming maw in yet another profit-orientated context. I am reminded of an artwork I saw at this year’s student art exhibition at the Western Australian Art Gallery — a commentary on different aspects of gun culture, from a form of critique of gun violence to a personal romanticising (attempting to be the opposite) of a ‘farm girl’ holding her rifle, owning her own destiny.

The contradictory message of this artwork wasn’t generative or liberating (which contradiction can so often be), but entirely compliant with the patriarchy, entirely compliant with one of the many versions of self-empowerment and self-confidence that gun manufacturers sell to the world (I should say that there were some superb artworks against abuse and degradation of animals in the exhibition — across ‘genders’).

There is no ownership of destiny with weapons — no ‘good’ and ‘bad’ version. Guns kill. There is nothing outside this. Maybe the student sees this? If so, she needs to develop her critique — maybe she will, and in doing so offer new ways of critiquing the existence of guns in all contexts. Guns will always be weapons, and only weapons. Guns are patriarchy whatever gender we identify with.

And taxidermy is what the faux-animating of dead animals is. How and why people collect the dead is also a question. The fox shot by a farmer/hunter and brought lovingly ‘back to life’ by the artiste? Gender is part of all we do, and has implications in all we enact, but some gender resistances and affirmations bring positive change, and sadly some don’t.

In his 1996 preface to Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin, London, 1998), the translator Michael Hamburger — a very ‘direct’ translator of the poet’s German — said, regarding the act of translation and possible doubts about his method, that ‘freedom to re-interpret, recast and even omit has never been my way. I had probably been needled by Robert Lowell’s description of my kind of translator as “taxidermists”.’ (p. xii)

The unwitting and grotesque irony of ‘needling’ aside (always amazes me how even experienced poets who are constantly dealing with the polysemous might miss a slippage if their own politico-ethics don’t allow for a broader expanse of contexts and interpretations), Hamburger’s distress is with the fact of not only bringing a living poem into a death, but that the poem is killed by such ‘directness’ in the first place. He, of course, felt it was not the case, but likely is offering the poem a life in a different habitat that is equivalent to the one it possesses in its originating language.

Lowell’s use of ‘taxidermy’ is actually an example of an artistic view of taxidermy as a false art of ‘life’ — one only ever moribund, bound in its origins of death. The ‘artistic’ acts of taxidermy as aesthetic enactments of the dead, making the dead perform for the living human audience, are of this category error. What Lowell wanted were ‘translations’ that, above all else, lived in the language in which they were being remade (a fine example of this is Richard Howard’s translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal).

Ironically, for all their literalness, Hamburger’s Hölderlins largely achieve this quality. But Hamburger’s final riposte to Lowell comes at the beginning of the last paragraph of his preface: ‘Gaps in Hölderlin’s fragmentary later poems have not been filled in with taxidermic stuffing.’ (p. xv) Does this defensiveness actually suggest that Hamburger well knew what his ‘needling’ represented in the discourse, and was using it to brutal effect?

In the making of metaphors, language can grow, but its growth doesn’t mean that cause and effect vanish for other uses of the word. Hamburger’s first use of Lowell’s reference is, of course, scare-quoted; his second isn’t. He has grown into his task of re-animating the supposed corpses of the English-language versions of Hölderlin’s poems. The dead poet, the dead era, the prophetic poet, the ‘modern’ audience as receptors, the leap across languages and a multitude of cultural variants, and the alienation of mortality, and the intimacy of dealing with the dead, all coalesce. In these usages, a form of rivalry and trophyism is afoot.

Taxidermy is about control, oppression, and hierarchy in its figurative as well as literal manifestations. And in the living world of media and textuality, as I was going to leave this piece at this point, another news item comes in — scientists-taxidermists at the Queensland Museum putting their ‘skills’ on show (‘hands on’) for the public during a science fair. Here we have the false claims of necessity and environmentalism — the notion that the dead are brought to life in their interaction with an audience (note the classic journos’ promotional ploy: ‘taxidermy comes to life’ — that headline ‘joke’ at the expense of the dead).

The museum’s colonial and imperialist urge cannot change — a museum that makes use of the dead is denying the rights (and rites) of passing from the corporeal to non-corporeal. A collection; a zoo of the dead. And note that ‘most’ corpses are brought in as roadkill or from some other apparently morally benign source. Most. Historically, naturalists have filled the museums of the world with captured specimens, killed to inform not only scientists but their customers, their audience, and ultimately their paymasters. Taxidermy is an act around which a language of euphemism, deception, dissembling, and gallows humour attempts to dilute ethics. Death is never entertainment! (Though, in the case of say, Jack White, entertainers can clearly be enthusiastic taxidermists and collectors of taxidermy — Meg White dabbled with less enthusiasm; so maybe taxidermists feel they can be enthusiastic entertainers).

And ‘science’ does not require this, no matter how it’s sold.

Statements

by John Kinsella (posted by Tracy)


I think some clarification regarding my views on a few matters might be useful for those who read this blog. A list might be the way to go — I apologise if it seems officious, as it’s not intended to be.

1. I still maintain that technology fetishism is destructive to the planet. These occasional forays into the electronic world, (kindly posted by Tracy), are not intended as some kind of personal approval of the medium. The internet and computers are, to my mind, part of the disturbing portrait of ecological destruction that is being painted across this planet. However, I do think that on occasion one must speak out through all means available, and that includes the internet. For the last two-and-a-half years I have lived in virtual isolation on a bush block, and I am proud of this, and believe that one should constantly aim to minimise impact on the ecologies of the planet. But one must also be wary of a quietism by default. Having said this, I maintain my (non-violent, pacifist) neo-luddite position that gratuitous technology is destructive in so many ways.

2. What has convinced me to go ‘out into the world’ in as low-impact a way as can be managed is the distress imposed on the place where we live by Targa West Rallying’s insistence on conducting one of their dangerous and environmentally insensitive events where we live. This is not just a case of one’s own backyard, but a microcosm of a much wider problem. I have always believed in acting locally. Use of the net to bring attention to this problem (as well as writing to local papers etc), is a judgement call: a case of two evils.

3. In going forth into the world again, I do so in the belief that one can minimise impact in so many ways. Still needing to make a living and demonstrate alternative ways of approaching one’s art and practice, I might contribute to a broader awareness. The experiences of the last few years are worth publicly articulating.

4. I recently dedicated a poem about human-induced climate change (which I believe is a fact) to Cate Blanchett. I did so because I am very sick of seeing contempt and ridicule of women who are willing to challenge the industrial and mining power complex. As someone who believes that centralised power of any sort is a denial of liberty, the controls and impositions of government in any context are anathema. However, I am also pragmatic in that I am interested in seeing ecologies protected and respected, and if taxing these industries, which I don’t think should exist at all, will in any way reduce their abusive hold on the lives of all living things, then that’s a step on the way. I place this under the rubric ‘umbrella anarchism’. In terms of the abuse I have copped for dedicating a poem to Cate Blanchett, well, so be it. I make no apologies; I stand by the poem and the dedication. At least she had the guts to stick her neck out. I have no interest in her status or her iconicity, only in her humanity and willingness to take a risk on a vital subject. The bullies have been merciless.

I have dedicated many poems in my life, to people including Yehudi Menuhin, Noam Chomsky, my partner and my own children. Every dedication has a political and ethical purpose that is also about respect of the ‘person’. Persons should be respected. The dedication is never arbitrary. The people to whom I dedicate poems don’t have to have my views; neither is my dedication necessarily a confirmation of their views. Dedications are subtle as well as loud. They do many things, and I think readers would benefit from considering the nature of their own varied interactions with others. It’s a strange imposition on what a poem is, to read a dedication as a rigid and ‘loud’ fact.

5. I have spent many years writing and campaigning around refugee rights. I believe emphatically that all people have a right to sanctuary, no matter where they come from or how they get anywhere. Australia is a racist country, and racism should be resisted in all pacifist ways possible. There should be no mandatory detention, and the so-called Malaysia solution (or that of any other place outside the ‘target’ place of the refugees) is outrageous.

6. The World Health Organisation have confirmed the high likelihood that mobile phones cause brain cancer. I don’t use a mobile phone, have never owned one, and am not about to start. They are the ‘asbestos’ of our time. It saddens me to see young people using them because of social expectation. So many people see themselves as liberated by technology when they are performing exactly as the industrial (and military) power complexes want them to.

7. Activism isn’t just fronting up at a demo. It especially isn’t damaging things or being violent. Activism is a record of how we live our lives. Twenty-five years of veganism have taught me that identifying cruelty in an abattoir (what do you expect, seriously?) is always going to be no more than ‘identification’ if one turns around and eats an animal. Don’t eat them and they won’t be slaughtered. Don’t eat them and the window for cruelty closes considerably.

8. I believe poetry can literally change things. Though it might trigger hatred, ridicule, abuse, it will inevitably create discussion. You can ask for no more, but that’s worth asking for. Often your poem won’t ‘be got’, but you have to accept that language has its own ways in different contexts. Once you take a poem outside the safety of the discourse (and that’s not really very safe), you have to expect to cop it. But it’s worth it. Allowing or offering a poem to be posted on the web, printed in a newspaper, read on the radio, etc, may contradict beliefs about the corruptions of media, etc, but pragmatically (‘umbrella anarchism’), maybe you help undo the structure itself by doing so. It’s that old pacifist Trojan Horse again. The net, for example, will consume itself in the end, if the power holds out that long.

9. I am about to write an essay on ‘greed’. I believe that greed’s many faces need identifying and I will attempt to do so. Anarchism for me is about sharing: not only of wealth, but of knowledge and experience. It’s also about being willing to receive where appropriate.

10. The small acts accumulate quickly. There is no radicalism in violence, just compliance. Violence is the illustration that future violence is based on. In perpetuity. Break the cycle. Each of us has it in us — the violence, and the ability to deny its pollution.

Vegan "Pirate" Party, Part One

By Tracy

Tim's pre-primary class has got their end-of-term party tomorrow, and the theme (which has been their theme all term) is "Pirates".

I've made some vegan sausage rolls, courtesy of this vegetarian blog which carries some vegan recipes, and am in the process of decorating a vegan pirate cake and gingerbread pirates -- more photos to follow...



We've been very lucky with open-minded and sympathetic teachers for both our kids, in terms of respecting the choice not to eat meat or animal products, visit zoos, etc. Nonetheless, mainstream schooling has its challenges for the anarchist pacifist vegan -- I think ours might turn out to be the only pirate ship cake with no guns, cutlasses or cannons...

Likewise for the superhero thing that seems to grab the imagination of pre-primary kids, certainly the boys if not the girls. Too many of these toys and related items promote aggression -- not only in theme but sometimes in actuality, e.g. superhero toys that shoot real little projectiles (I wonder how these pass safety standards, anyway?).

Tim likes Superman and Spiderman because "they don't have weapons" (at least in the versions he knows of them -- he is too young to watch the movies!).

In any case, at the moment, they are taking a back seat to his real current obsession: ACDC.

On Anarchism: Part One

Tracy Ryan interviews John Kinsella on Anarchism

Transcript of talk given in 2004 at the State Library of WA, originally with introductions by Professor Bill Louden (formerly ECU), and anarchist activist Mar Bucknell.

Tracy
There are many different historical aspects of anarchism, some of which you would probably define yourself against. And I’m thinking particularly of the aspect of violence. So I’m going to start with a quote that I will run by John, that I read recently in a post-graduate French course studying Sartre’s play Les Mains sales, in which a lecturer gave the following definition for the benefit of students.

“An anarchist is a person (this is a very dated definition) who seeks to overturn by violent means all constituted forms and institutions of government and society, with no aim of establishing any other system of order in place of that destroyed.”

So, what I’m going to ask John is, Would you comment on that definition and perhaps contrast it with your own understanding of what an anarchist or anarchism might be?

John
Today I don’t want to get into an historical discussion of anarchism. I don’t want to regurgitate nineteenth-century anarchists, but Malatesta made a great point about anarchism being the abolition of government and not the abolition of society, and I kind of concur with that. The replacement of governing institutions and hierarchical bodies of control with co-operative, with mutual aid organisations, people interacting to support each other. It’s a very viable and practical alternative to me, if not the only alternative. So from the start what I’m talking about is a world without government, and not a world without social institutions or interactions. Institutions is the wrong word – social interactions. I think that’s extremely important.

Obviously I would say (agree with others) that such a definition was absurd. A dictionary definition that’s very convenient, immediately isolates, and removes any debate about anarchist issues. Anarchism isn’t, and from the most aggressive anarchists I’ve never heard it put as, simply a violent overthrow of the state with nothing in its place; that’s nihilism and not anarchism. I’m a pacifist above and beyond everything else, and veganism, the kind of non-use and non-abuse of animals, is the basis of my anarchist thought. I start from there and move out. So an anarchist’s world is one in which animals are equal, if you like, as much as humans.

The very starting point of a violent overthrow is not possible from my point of view. I don’t believe in “revolution as such”; I believe in change by example. And I’m going to be referring, as I know Tracy will as well, to a guy named Colin Ward. This is a book of his just come out called Talking Anarchy. Colin Ward is an interesting British anarchist, who is very much involved in architectural solutions to housing for people. And his anarchism is a very pragmatic and a very practical anarchism that works within the context of the existing state. He believes that the state can be best changed by good example. So if you behave in a way that’s better than the government is behaving, then people will gradually see that as a viable alternative to living, living communally. There is a lot I disagree with in Ward, but that basic principle I really do agree with. So, just as a starting point for this, I totally reject any kind of violent overthrow of anything – it seems a contradiction in terms to me.

We are working towards a better world of egalitarianism and equality especially in terms of what people have or don’t have. Then the moment you introduce violence, you are introducing a hierarchy already. Violence is the ultimate form of hierarchy. It’s the most controlling form of hierarchy. I would argue that many actual actions, ethically, cancell out any positive results. And I think that is a very personal view, as I said, that comes out of pacifism and veganism. That’s where I start.

Tracy
Thinking about that better world you mentioned and looking at the quote that we have there which is from God and the State, where Bakunin says “the liberty of man consists solely in this, that he (and he says ‘he’ because he is using the word ‘man’) obeys natural laws because he has himself recognised them as such, not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic world whatever, divine or human, collective or individual”.

Now what I’m going to ask you about that is the following: Many people find it hard to believe that a human being can or would follow what Bakunin calls “natural laws” without the existence of the whole paraphernalia that polices, punishes, regulates them and so on.

So this is linked to the popular beliefs that anarchism means “chaos”, that if we didn’t have those things we wouldn’t do the right thing.

There are a few questions coming up here that are kind of related. What do you make of the common complaint that anarchism as an idea is too optimistic or utopian? Does it rely too much on the concept of human goodwill and altruism? Is it naive, vis-à-vis the selfishness and the violence we see enacted around us daily, I mean in the world that is, rather than the better world? A similar accusation is often made regarding pacifism, you know, people say: if we try it, will all the pacifists be wiped out straight away? So I’m kind of playing devil’s advocate here, and asking John – is it too optimistic to think this way?

John
Well, no, you see, I don’t see anarchism as utopia. I see it as something incredibly realisable. Speaking of Malatesta again, he also made the point – you can’t expect us all to know what will happen after changes come. He said after revolution – as I’ve already indicated, it’s a term I have a lot of problems with for all sorts of reasons, which might become evident as we go on. But certainly the point is that people and things find their own level of interaction. The basic principle of mutual aid, which is fundamental for understanding anarchist thought, is that people naturally help each other because it is in their best interest to help each other, and when Kropotkin wrote about mutual aid, he looked at the false nature of the Darwinian model in which people compete to beat each other, which is the system capitalism is based on, and basically, eventually, some of the strongest will survive and conquer. The other way of looking at it, he makes the point, is that animals have always had to work together to survive in their communities, and he gives interesting examples of that.

This kind of mutual aid is fundamental not only to the existence of animals, but to the existence of humans. We don’t have a policeman sitting watching over us – we might have in the audience! – we don’t have someone policing in this room, and we are sitting here listening to an argument we may not agree with. However, basic mutual aid is there in the sense of co-operating together to actually hear something, and maybe express ourselves at the end... People can interact, people can respond in a responsible way towards each other without being told to do so, and the idea is that without governing bodies, without the judiciary, without the different constabulary, without the kind of legislature and these kind of things, we can actually do this anyway. So there is a very practical side, certainly, to the anarchist thought that I’m interested in.

The other thing is that, apart from these “what will happen” scenarios, the idea that we are fundamentally good and not bad drives my thought. Many people say that a lot of the stuff I write about seems very negative. Well, negative in the sense that I criticise things I see as wrong. I see the treatment, the locking-up of refugees as wrong, I see the war in Iraq as wrong – I can list the whole series of wrongs I feel. My subjective take on it is one thing, but fundamentally what is being talked about here is an ethical way of living. Now, you may have very different ethical views, but at the same time you have some form of ethical system where you denote good and bad, and I think intrinsically people have that ability, and I don’t think it’s a class ability, and I don’t think it’s something you are taught. I think it’s very inherent. I think that in the same way that an animal is neither good nor bad, they are – I think that humans are neither good nor bad, they are inherently good because of that – if you know what I mean. You can have both because both exist in you; goodness exists in you as well.

So my kind of take on it comes from an ethical standpoint, and Bakunin is a problem for me in a variety of ways. I strongly believe that many ills of the world have come about because of the abuses of science. I have no problem with the accumulation of knowledge and the use of knowledge; I do have a problem with the systematising of knowledge, when knowledge is used to create a hierarchy, and science more than anything else has created hierarchy. You know the addiction of discovery isn’t always to benefit human kind; it’s to benefit the ‘discoverer’ or the ‘culture’ of discovery – the actual pleasuring of discovery – to ‘enlighten’ becomes to fetishise... in a marketed sense to add value to science. Now Bakunin recognised the irony of science but he still, like many anarchists in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, and indeed some people I would consider having very similar views who were involved with Freedom Press in Britain, strongly support/ed the kind of scientific approach to an anarchist solution.

So they say that when the government is gone, what we will have is a kind of knowledge, science will continue and the hospitals will be hospitals, and so on. And I have a more agrarian view of the world, and I think that society would naturally break down into smaller component parts. They are talking about a decentralised world, obviously, but I’m talking more literally about a very small component part, a very agrarian kind of anarchism.

I believe in direct contact and preservation of the land, and I think the only way you can do that is by actually understanding what the land physically is. Bakunin makes this very interesting point, and I strongly disagree with it. He says “What I preach then is, to a certain extent, the revolt of life against science, or rather against the government of science, not to destroy science – that would be high treason to humanity – but to remand it to its place so that it can never leave it again.” On one level he is talking about the fact that governance isn’t just literally the bodies that govern us; it’s the way systems operate, and science becoming a system, the kind of move towards cloning a human being isn’t about the survival of the human species, it’s about a kind of value-adding to humanity, which is a very big problem for me. Bakunin is challenging that, as he would if he was standing here, I imagine, challenge the art of cloning and these sort of things. But he is still reserving a place for science as rational. Science for him is rationality; it’s an Enlightenment thing, and he believes very much in a kind of logic. Anarchism for Bakunin was a very logical thing. His logic extended to violent revolution – mine doesn’t, and that’s where we strongly part; but it’s an interesting point.

Tracy
Science, rational science, as we see it practised, has a lot of problems of course for the vegan, in ways that are perhaps obvious; and also, thinking of mutual aid, there is a kind of implicit recognition there, even if it’s not followed all the way through, of the relation between animals and humans, because he’s arguing that it’s not only in the competitive sense that we draw on our animal origin, but also in a sense of mutual aid.

Thinking about veganism: in my experience, many people, if they have heard of veganism and know what it is, believe it to be a dogmatic and authoritarian type of outlook. This may be partly a fear of difference, because it is potentially threatening to meet someone whose lifestyle implicitly rejects your own, and especially when it comes to food, because eating together is such a communal activity, some feel very rejected by someone who doesn’t eat the same.

But it’s also true that some vegans are very loudly critical of non-vegans and may appear to be rigid and fanatical. Could you comment on this image – how it squares with your own personal outlook, and also with your anarchist beliefs, because that kind of rigid authoritarian stance would be directly in opposition to anarchism.

John
One of the things that has always disturbed me in talking to fellow anarchists is that as soon as you mention that you are a vegan, most anarchists I’ve known haven’t been vegans or vegetarians – some have, but most haven’t – the objection has been that you’re imposing just another authority, another kind of hierarchy. But if you see an equality between animals and humans as a starting point, it’s not possible to have a hierarchy of imposition or declaration in that ‘equation’, and that’s the way I see it.

One of the scariest moments of my life when I was at Cambridge, where I lived part of the year, was when I met my first vegan straight-edge. He was a young guy and he had engraved in his arm a statement – it wasn’t “meat is murder” but it was something very similar – he did have some line from the Smiths on his arm, and I got talking to him. He went through his list of absolute ‘don’ts’, including no sexual activity – basically it was no pleasure on any level, and intellectually I can appreciate where he was coming from, I could see there was a kind of abstaining that was almost the ultimate control, and I can respect that even if I don’t subscribe to it.

But where I don’t agree is that he said basically: those of my friends who have betrayed us have been branded, physically with a branding iron, and I said to him, “That’s not a vegan activity. Vegan activity is not to damage or utilise or abuse any animals, humans included, for your benefit or for any other purpose.” And he said, “No, we don’t see it that way. We see the only way of creating a revolution against the damaging and hurting of animals is to be really strict and rigid in our thinking.” I could see where he was coming from, but it immediately defeated the ethics of his veganism, for me.

Near Cambridge there is something called Huntingdon Life Sciences, which is the main place for animal vivisection and animal research, and straight-edgers have been very prominent in direct action against this, literally breaking into it and damaging it and so on. Now I can understand, and in my younger years I was involved in direct action against property, but I learned that this can develop its own hierarchies of behaviour and overwhelm itself with contradictions. I have felt over the years that violent direct action – even against property – delays but doesn’t solve... I was prepared to try anything to resist and challenge what I considered to be state-imposed oppressions. I thought, well, maybe it’s worth trying. Mostly it was yelling and screaming at the tools of state and corporate capitalism, which I was very inclined to doing, certainly around the time I met my anarchist friend, Mar Bucknell. When I met with Mar and ‘his’ group in Fremantle, it was a really amazing experience. I had all this intellectual stuff, I had read all this stuff and I thought – this is where I’m at, this is what I think. But what struck me with these people and what deeply interested me in them – even though my behaviour was reprehensible and I apologise to them for my nihilism at the time – was their dedication to idea and action operating in tandem. Everything had to be discussed and worked through as a group of individuals. A consensus operated, as opposed to my individualised martyrdom for what I believed to be right.

Tracy
This is going back how many years?

John
This is twenty or twenty-one years ago, it would be 1983/84; and as Mar told me at the time I was a nihilist, not an anarchist. I just wanted to basically remove everything that was a problem very rapidly. What interested me about this group was that they actually had practical solutions. They had this wonderful newsletter (and this is how I discovered them, when someone gave me a newsletter, New from Nowhere) where I saw this thing about someone who was in academic life, who was an anarchist, who’d drawn up this plan for a possible agrarian commune – with practical outcomes like ‘that’s where the water-tank should be’ – the kind of background information needed, and it made sense and it was very practical and I loved that practical side to it. These guys were very practical – direct action to them was something that was mediated by a kind of a longer view of things and that impressed me. Although I didn’t fit in, because I wasn’t capable of fitting in with anyone, pretty well, at that stage, I have thought about it over the last ten years and tried to put a lot of those things into effect.

Go to Part Two