Colonialism & neocolonialism don't have a hair's breadth between them. They institutionalize and amplify and focus to political ends both casual cruelty and the small, everyday, habitual cruelties - bullying at school, hazing in the army/at military schools/fraternities/in sports clubs, rape culture. Abu Ghraib torture was built on hazing rituals. There are also formal schools of torture such as the School of the Americas, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Central and South American governments and death-squads learnt their trades there for decades, in the dark heart of democracy. (Which has always been democracy for me and servitude for thee.)
Tools of the state reach down and allow private psychosis to become policy, to give us law and order which is at heart torture, to give us foreign policy which is at heart torture.
Overt and implicit war liberate psychosis. Psychosis makes war granular.
A Royal Commission is a particular kind of stacked committee…
Who’s left, beyond the Finns* & New Zealanders, to liberate the camps?
To take Australia to trial for this history of imprisoning refugees? (Which has been going on for close to 20 years.)
For Aboriginal deaths in custody? (Murder/suicides which publicly protested as long ago as 1987, committed much longer than that; which had increased to the point of public protest.)
Tools of the state reach down and allow private psychosis to become policy, to give us law and order which is at heart torture, to give us foreign policy which is at heart torture.
Overt and implicit war liberate psychosis. Psychosis makes war granular.
A Royal Commission is a particular kind of stacked committee…
Who’s left, beyond the Finns* & New Zealanders, to liberate the camps?
To take Australia to trial for this history of imprisoning refugees? (Which has been going on for close to 20 years.)
For Aboriginal deaths in custody? (Murder/suicides which publicly protested as long ago as 1987, committed much longer than that; which had increased to the point of public protest.)
Photograph of poster on display in the South Australian Museum, July, 1988. The artist has dated it '87.
==
*In Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next the segment on Finland shows an education system which isn't aimed at producing low-wage labour on the one hand, and corporate apparatchiks on the other. It is aimed at producing adults with autonomy, skilled and self-directed, who expect and are expected to find work that is meaningful to them.
==
*In Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next the segment on Finland shows an education system which isn't aimed at producing low-wage labour on the one hand, and corporate apparatchiks on the other. It is aimed at producing adults with autonomy, skilled and self-directed, who expect and are expected to find work that is meaningful to them.
