notes, bits thrown out of early drafts

In the very early twenty-first century, settler-colonial states such as South Africa, Israel and Australia, have still found themselves managing the consequences and continuations of their foundations: aggressive invasions, domination and displacements accompanied by discourses of racial purity. OK, religious and/or racial purity.

While settler-colonial states can enact a politics which declares that the indigenous inhabitants do not exist, or are not people, the problem that is survival remains. Indigenous peoples have neither been killed or exiled, nor been dispersed and integrated, out of existence.

These states of necessity face the indigenous question, the problem of the survival of prior inhabitants. Borders can be erected against the foreign and the impure, and libidinally invested with fantasies of domestic purity, but the indigenous, always-already present, generally find that colonial nation-building entails the formation of numerous internal borders, defining areas of concentration and exclusion, citizenship and its others, relations of command and of ownership.

At first glance the centrality of this question for the reproduction of particular states can crudely appear as if it is in a direct and inverse relationship to the asymptotically complete extermination or exile of Indigenous populations, but more particularly it is a problem of survival and development: the survival and persistence of forms of life in contradiction to the system of social relations upon whose reproduction and expansion the state depends, and the development of political cultures and cultural politics which arise from the struggles and resistances of Indigenous peoples.

white identity politicians

Colonisation is warfare, remaking political geography in the extension of empire or the foundation of new states. As the political form of a settler-colony, founded by the British Empire in violent expropriation from those who had lived there for thousands of years, the colonial Australian state was both. This state has always been the continuation of this colonial warfare by political means, which entails the management of its consequences.

This state and public political discourse have long evinced anxieties about territorial borders and the boundaries of citizenship – concepts, of course, which have never been coterminous. From the beginning the Australian Labor Party declared its commitment to a racially pure nation. The Australian constitution explicitly authorises the institutionalisation of racial discrimination, justified at the time of its creation in terms of white racial hegemony. From that time, through the long period of the now officially repudiated White Australia policy, through waves of mass migration and the eventual promulgation of ‘multiculturalism’ as a state-sponsored discourse of national ethnic harmony and a strategy for the state management of difference, through to the creation in Australia of the world’s first privately-owned, user-pays concentration camps known as “immigration detention centres”, these anxieties have been continually mobilized and instrumentalised.

Along with anxieties over the fixing and policing of borders and citizenship comes the inverse anxiety about, and defensive assertions of, the content of this defended ‘Australian-ness’, whether seen as essentially ‘white’ or ‘Anglo’ or as ‘multicultural’ – or, in various senses, as both. The question of ‘Australian identity’ posed as a question of identity or ‘values’, framed without explicit reference to race or ethnicity, but nonetheless national and no less racialised. Indeed, ‘white’ is still seen as outside of ethnicity, as external the multicultural concept of ‘culture’, thus dividing citizens into distinct if de facto categories. Thus, to repeat an example, the Law Council of Australia, in its Senate submission on the Crimes Amendment (Bail and Sentencing) Bill 2006, continually and somewhat comically distinguished between “people of multicultural backgrounds” and others.

In the context of Australia’s “war on terror”, waged against enemies assumed to be Islamic, these fictitious “values” have been redeployed as that which national enemies are said to lack, whether they are in Australian territory or not, whether they are citizens or not. Though the shift to ever-harsher border control regimes pre-dates the officially-declared “war on terror”, the discourses and practices of both have considerable overlap and have intertwined and reshaped Australian politics and society, as both seek new forms of surveillance and control over mobility and deploy narcissistic cliches as the content of their appeals to nationalism.

This new competitive cretinisation of political performance, tied to rhetorics of nation, of borders and security, was evident, for example, in the ongoing exchange between government and opposition in 2006, after the Liberal government declared that all prospective migrants should be required to commit to a list of governmentally-determined “Australian values”. The opposition agreed but extended this principle: all visitors to Australia, every person applying for a visa, would have to “sign off” on the ALP’s designation of “Aussie values”:

• Respect for Australia’s institutions, including its democracy, laws, courts, parliaments, armed forces and police.
• Respect for different religions and cultures, for the equal treatment of women, and for hard work.

So the “equal treatment of women”, absurdly proclaimed as an essential Aussie value, has become available to even the most reactionary anti-feminist as an asserted distinction between civilised and uncivilised people, a distinction then equally absurdly collapsed into categories of friend and enemy. The purpose includes a not very subtle demonstration of hostility to Muslims as they have come to be represented.

The intersection of border control, xenophobia, and the patriotism of “Aussie values” can be most neatly exemplified, perhaps, by the title some wished to give to these new requirements, metonymically derived from the proliferation of Australia’s most banal figure of nationalism: the ‘mateship visa’. This kind of fantasy politics is pure propaganda, in that the proposals were unlikely to meaningfully impact on anything: they simply act to promote the compulsory racism of the moment, presenting a somewhat ridiculous image in which we are invited to see ourselves, if we are the appropriate recipient.

More recent fantasies, such as those about all those scarily violent anti-APEC protesters, are likely to have much more immediate and themselves scary consequences, as protesters are more-or-less condemned for lacking that very “respect for Australia’s institutions, including its democracy, laws, courts, parliaments, armed forces and police.” which the Opposition leader so wanted visa applicants to have to ritually affirm. But if it is a competition, I think neither are as significant or as dreadful as the ‘intervention’ into the lives of Indigenous people in the Northern Territory - in any case all three illustrate overlapping tendencies making up this violent democracy.

This suspicion of the foreigner always includes suspicion of the foreigner within, and a call for people to enjoy the new racisms and identifications with violent authority decorating this barren lunar landscape.

the looming threat
We are in the middle of ‘APEC Leaders Week’ - 2 and 9 September, though the new powers last until 12 September. With all this rubbish about ‘violence’, protesters have more to fear than anybody else, by far.

As APEC approaches, and on a daily, even almost hourly basis, we can choose to be outraged or laugh at the ridiculous things being said and done by a familiar line-up of media, politicians and police. The misrepresentation of dissenting texts as declaring violent intent when they do no such thing, or of groups as planning violence when this, too, is science fiction, seems like it cannot be accidental, a misreading, chance misinterpretation, but in any case helps create a surreal hysteria about anti-APEC protesters. Since Arterial Bloc doesn’t exist anymore, and since they were publicly blamed for events at G20 by people like Marcus (DSP), the group Mutiny is getting the worst of this, like the ISO did in the early nineties, with ridiculous allegations of Mutiny plotting away and distributing how-to guides to hurting people:

police are continuing to investigate reports that a group called ‘Mutiny’ is distributing a training manual for people wanting to take part in violent protests during APEC.

I don’t believe that police are doing any such thing, since if they were, wouldn’t they just talk to people in Mutiny and/or read the publication in question, which isn’t secret and isn’t a manual for death, or a manual for anything at all really? I think they know this is rubbish. Maybe there is somewhere outside of my world where this doesn’t all seem absurd, but, having some sense of the social and political networks being described, that notional ’somewhere’ could only be defined by ignorance. These aren’t paranoid police; they are liars pre-justifying any repression. These aren’t honest journalists; they are collaborators in lies who know this is all nonsense and propaganda but don’t care to make fun of a nude empire whose participants include every major politician, almost all major media outlets, police, intelligence types. It’s the Gulf of Tonkin every day of the week with these people.

In reality the only real possibility of mass violence comes from the possibility that police will use force to try to stop a large crowd of people walking along the street. Or maybe if police force their way into the crowd to try to snatch people who have been declared troublemakers and second-class citizens “on the basis of their alleged involvement in previous political protests”.

One question for the Stop The War Coalition in Sydney, which has spent a great deal of time being ‘official protest organisers’ and declaring how peaceful everyone is going to be, is surely: what to do if the police, with their extraordinary powers to fuck people up, move beyond attempting prior restraint and won’t let people peacefully dawdle down the road at all? Or at least at all in the very large parts of Sydney called the “exclusion zone”, from which the politer conventions of liberal democracy have been exiled, because that zone is for the leaders? If the desire to avoid confrontation - confrontation which would, of course, be attributed to “protester violence” by Liberals/ALP/corporate media/police - requires that people give up on the planned march, what will the Coalition want to do? And how would they seek to bring this about - with their megaphones and marshals and all? by prior decision (which would give the police zero incentive to let people march, if they believed the Coalition’s claim to be able to stop people themselves)? More meetings will be taking place closer to the events, particularly to Saturday’s events. At the last meeting, Greens Parliamentarian Kerry Nettle’s advisor Damien Lawson vigorously argued that marshals should actively police people at the protest so that the cops don’t have to, but not everyone wanted to go down this route. So we will see.

the void
This is a recent statement from the Flare in the Void collective:

The violence of the state all over the world is always justified by supposed threats of violence from others. It is not protestors that are preparing for violence at APEC, but the government and the police force.

“What has been reported in newspapers as protestors preparing for violent demonstrations, on closer look, is actually protestors preparing to defend themselves against the highly publicised planned violence of the police force,” says Sarah Connor of Flare in the Void collective, which put out that conference reader being described as a manual of death, I presume.

“For months, the police and the government have been training for violence, purchasing new weapons to be used against protestors such as the $600,000 water cannon, and making it clear that they will not be holding back any force in dealing with protestors.”

The extreme emergency legislation that has been put into place for the APEC weekend demonstrates that the state will go to severe lengths to buffer protest, such as limiting rights to be released on bail and effectively locking down the city and restricting the rights of people to be on the streets. This is all part of an ongoing campaign of fear and intimidation, to stop people from demonstrating against APEC and the representatives who will be attending.

“The preparations for police violence we are witnessing here in Sydney are very similar to the violence and militarism that is part of the policies of APEC and instigated throughout the world at the hands of APEC’s constituent governments. We are experiencing an ongoing War on Terror and militarisation across the world, particularly in the military occupations of Iraq, the Solomon Islands and throughout the Pacific, and even in our own country with the recent military occupations in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory,” says Sarah.

“The police state we are seeing created for the APEC summit in Sydney is the everyday experience of ordinary people in such places. John Howard has attempted to blame protesters for the lockdown of the city that will soon begin. Yet if we look at who these measures are designed to protect, it is people that are responsible for the deaths of millions in war, and the corporations that profit from the destruction of the planet and the poverty and working conditions of everyone else.”

In protesting APEC we are protesting against this violence, against the economic policies of APEC that perpetuate inequality and suffering in our own country and around the world, against the repression of Indigenous peoples and denial of their autonomy and self-determination. We are protesting as part of the ongoing struggles of our everyday lives

Flare in the Void is an open space for a discussion of these various struggles, for the development of unity and solidarity in our opposition to state violence and the policies of APEC, but also space to discuss developing alternative communities, because resistance goes beyond one protest. Workshops that will be presented cover a range of issues, from struggles in Palestine, to the military occupation of the Northern Territory, to Community Response to Sexual Assault and Activist Trauma Support.

For more information contact Sarah Connor on 0434 585 264

declared areas

A good portion of Sydney is now considered to be a “declared area” under the new laws. Police can erect barricades and fences, and have, and can create ‘checkpoints’ to control entry, can stop and search cars that are inside the area, or which people want to drive inside the declared area, can search people, including search anything they have. and can thus force people to remove coats, jackets, shoes and hats. Police can confiscate any spray paint, chains, handcuffs and lock-on devices, any poles more than one metre long, marbles or ball bearings, smoke devices and flares, flammable or noxious liquids, laser pointers, and jamming devices.

According to the NSW Police Minister: “As long as a person agrees to surrender the item they will be allowed to pass. As I said before, the general rule is that, subject to submitting to a search if required and surrendering any prohibited items held without a special justification, persons will be able to enter declared areas.”

And of course police can forcibly exclude certain people on the basis that they:

pose a serious threat to the safety of persons or property within the area as identified by the NSW Police Force. These persons will be identified by police on the basis of intelligence information. […] Police will have the power to take action to reduce the risk of large-scale public disorder connected with APEC, with persons disobeying a reasonable direction able to be removed from the declared area.

Police can “establish motorcade and clearway routes” and “clear or remove vehicles, people or other things blocking these routes”, while, and this is an important one, “any person who commits an offence of assault police, malicious damage, or throw missile at police within a declared or restricted area will attract a presumption against bail. While the presumption does not normally apply for these offences, it will apply only for APEC such that the maximum time that a person would be in custody would be 14 days.”