POLITICS, POETRY & SATIRE
Enabled by the US, Australia, UK and other western white supremacist colonialists, Israel’s genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are ever-expanding, one year on from October 7. Boycott Israel today and every day until Palestinian people have all their rights which are guaranteed under international law, denied to them by land-thieving, white supremacist Israel and rest of the West for the past 76 years.
(AI art by Jinjirrie)
this is a poem about feelings
here’s some money
to collaborate with invaders
how do you feel?
if this poem is white supremacy
there’s a euro boot on your neck
how do you feel?
if this poem is a dominant force
do you resist?
do you understand your oppressor
forgive them and heal them
be nice to the boot
as it crushes you to death
if this poem is oppression
if this poem is about land theft
whatever you do, don’t judge whitey
that won’t feed them
this is a poem about irony
it’s not about me
it’s never fair
divide and rule
they take your share
can’t you see
it’s not about you
they’re never kind
they have your absence in mind
this is a poem about hegemony
this is a poem about genocide
when there’s none alive to object
nowhere left to hide
October 16, 2023
Those who remain silent and pretend to be neutral about deliberate psychopathic criminality, which Israel has conducted against the people of Palestine since 1948 in order to steal their land become complicit with genocide.
As Desmond Tutu said:
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
Raz Segal, an Israeli expert in modern genocide:
‘I think that, indeed, what we’re seeing now in Gaza is a case of genocide. We have to understand that the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide from 1948 requires that we see special intent for genocide to happen. And to quote the convention, intent to destroy a group is defined as racial, ethnic, religious or national as such that is collectively, not just individuals. And this intent, as we just heard, is on full display by Israeli politicians and army officers since 7th of October. We heard Israel’s president. It’s well-known what the Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on 9th of October declaring a complete siege on Gaza, cutting off water, food, fuel, stating that “We’re fighting human animals,” and we will react “accordingly.” He also said that “We will eliminate everything.” We know that Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari, for example, acknowledged wanton destruction and said explicitly, “The emphasis on damage and not on accuracy.” So we’re seeing the special intent on full display. And really, I have to say, if this is not special intent to commit genocide, I really don’t know what is.’
The parallels with British colonial genocide of Aboriginal people in Australia are striking.
‘The analysis of the frontier genocides waged against the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia reveals a surprisingly congruent pattern despite the fact that the cases took place on different continents, under different regimes, and in different periods. The pattern divides into three phases. Colonists initiate the first by invasion. Economic and political
frictions then develop between the two groups as they struggle for limited resources and political power. Unable to compete with the invaders’ technology, arms, and wealth, the indigenous people find their economy fundamentally threatened and basic political rights denied under the settler regime. Aboriginal people begin the second phase by attacking settlers and their property in an attempt to regain access to economic resources, reclaim lost land, protect political rights, or exact revenge. Settlers and their government then retaliate, but cannot quickly defeat the indigenous peoples’ guerilla insurgency. Out of frustration and expediency, the invaders choose a “final solution” to the military conflict.
During and after the genocidal military campaign, the settlers’ government initiates the final phase by incarcerating Aboriginal people in camps that bear comparison with the Soviet gulag. In these reservations, settler governments continue genocidal policy though a varying combination of malnutrition, insufficient protection from the elements, inadequate medical care, overwork, unsanitary conditions, and violence.’
what is this verbose cotton wool
but suffocation of truth?
sentinel poet effuses verse
for privileged settlers
descant to daily injustices
chorused in white racist media
relentless revisions of theft and denial
endless rights and return betrayal
triumphalism of patriarchal curses
veiled advice to contaminate resistance
normalise collaboration
embrace post-colonial defeat
tender submission to ongoing genocide
for security of invaders
boot must sink in hard
negative peace sucks the bones
such brave generous poetry
healing to conqueror spirit
a noxious complicity with drones
rubbing noses of oppressed
in the misery of their predicament
with hubris of beauty and art
escaped red lines revealed
in anodyne alliterations
and poetic capitulations
January 26, 2018
Invasion
Invasio
Invasi
Invas
Inva
Inv
In
I
January 26, 2018
“The new campaign to deny the Aboriginal genocide, led by Quadrant, was taken up in the Australian mass media by a chorus of right wing columnists with records of antagonism to Aborigines and “leftist” supporters, and easy access to a wide public.”
In Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia by Ben Kiernan.
‘Even within the realm of literature, political writers and readers knew that their enemies were active. In 1956, Richard Krygier, head of the local arm of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, established Quadrant, explicitly intended, as he put it, as ‘a counterweight to the kind of leftism so evident in Meanjin.’ The founders of Quadrant liaised about their project with ASIO and Prime Minister Robert Menzies; their funding came primarily from the the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
Yes, that’s right – Quadrant, that scourge of tax-payer funded arts organisations, owes its existence to money secretly siphoned from American taxpayers courtesy of the CIA.’
https://overland.org.au/2014/06/overland-and-the-cia/
‘ After a series of exposes and repudiations of the CIA connection, in 1967 McAuley published a careful response in Quadrant admitting the funding from the CIA was ‘deplorable’, but no more than ‘a well-intentioned blunder’. His defence that he had been an unwitting recipient of CIA largesse has been restated by the new editor of Quadrant and by its previous editors. Yet how was McAuley so unaware when Clem Christesen knew the money came from the CIA as far back as 1956? How was it that the editor of Quadrant had shown so little curiosity as to the source of money being so liberally handed out? A quick perusal of McAuley’s editorials give the flavour of the invective he would employ should the editor of a left-wing magazine discover he had ‘unwittingly’ been receiving 40% of his income from the KGB.’
http://jacketmagazine.com/12/pybus-quad.html
‘THE conservative magazine Quadrant has accused the Australia Council of political bias after its annual grant for next year was cut by 30 per cent, from $50,000 to $35,000.
Quadrant’s editor, the historian Keith Windschuttle, a key protagonist in the history wars who denies that the removal of Aboriginal children from their families was racist or deliberate policy, has written to subscribers saying the decision by the council’s literature board was ”patently political”.’
‘The troubles Quadders has with Ozco funding might suggest that they would have an easier time returning to the CIA as their main funding source. But wait – in Cassadnra Pybus’s The Devil and James McAuley, we learn that the Congress for Cultural Freedom (the irony-free CIA front set up to pay for magazines like Encounter and Quadrant) repeatedly warned the magazine’s early editors that it was too politically strident, and not publishing enough of genuine cultural worth.
Got that? Even the CIA thought Quadrant didn’t publish enough good poetry.’
From Pulse:
The atrocities committed in the camps of Sabra and Shatila should be put in the context of an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. The MacBride report found that these atrocities “were not inconsistent with wider Israeli intentions to destroy Palestinian political will and cultural identity.” [17] Since Deir Yassin and the other massacres of 1948, those who survived have joined hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing a litany of massacres committed in 1953, 1967 and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the killing is still going on today. Thus were the victims and survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre gathered up in the perpetual nakba of the slaughtered, the dispossessed, the displaced and the discarded – a pattern of ethnic cleansing perpetrated under the Zionist plan to finally and forever extinguish Palestinian society and its people.
This is why we must remember Sabra and Shatila, twenty-five years on.
Two more tweets have appeared on the newly founded @KevinRuddPM informing us patient followers that he has respectively arrived in Washington and had briefings with the Treasurer and Embassy Staff in preparation for tomorrow’s meeting, and met with Madeline Albright, she of the blithe gaffe that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children through the hideous sanctions over Iraq were “worth it”.
No doubt Ms Albright, presently a top advisor to Obama on national security, would have some pertinent insights into the global stock market schmozzle, given her past position on the NYSE Board. Albright resigned in 2005 after the Grasso scandal.
Considering her past opposition toward recognising the Armenian genocide which occurred during the final days of Ottoman rule in World War 1, the importance of Turkey as one of the trusty US land-bound aircraft carrier vassal countries in the Middle East and the concurring predilections of newly appointed Chief Advisor to Obama, Rahm Emmanuel, along with Obama’s grovelling to AIPAC, it would be surprising indeed if the US shifted its current position to the Holocaust suffered by the Armenian people.
