PEACE - POT FOR PEACE, PEACE FOR POT

LETTERS

In this tragic age, state terrorism has attained unprecedented levels of mechanical and clinical efficiency. The relentless wars of conquest prosecuted by the imperial armies of the United States and its clients are now intended to be perpetual, (remember Orwell, 1984, “We have always been at war with Eurasia”). George Bush Jr has declared that his “war on terror” will last generations and could in fact go on forever. The Muslim, ever disdained by the west, and not for the first time in history, is again the official demon, forced conveniently into the vacuum left by the break up of the Soviet Union.

I have a recurrent fantasy; the war lovers declare war and no-one shows up to fight. No-one buys the lie, and the masters of war can find no willing soldiers to fight for them. But it is only a fantasy. I know fascism is again on the rise, there is a huge emergent conservatism in the world youth, and there are countless new grunts desperate or cruel enough to heed Bush’s call to arms. (The desperate ones are mostly poor, often black and Hispanic, the cruel ones are those naturally atavistic types, inclined toward murder and plundering, -the natural born killers).

It seems I have not been the only naive idealist deluded by the fantasy of human world peace, and I write to you in response to an article in your April edition by Binnah Powell (Stay True, NGT April 2006), and in defence of the embattled Mardi Grass Poster, whose creator Binnah condemns as “hypocritical” and “misguided”

There is a war on whether we like it or not, and whether we believe it or not. George Bush Sr. declared the war in the early 1990’s, as did Tricky Dicky Nixon before him, and J Edgar Hoover before him, and so on. If we don’t show up in some capacity to resist this tyranny, those who would oppress us certainly will, and they will go on oppressing us. The real hypocrisy is not the new Mardi Grass poster, but Binnah’s (and other) well intentioned but flawed attacks upon it. I am loath to criticise such articles, because I know their authors are coming from a space of love and envision an ideal world much like the one I envision. But such articles actually undermine the human spirit in its quest for freedom, and foster a permissive “in denial” approach to tyranny.

We cry “shame on Japan, save the whales,” and so we should. We cry “war, what is it good for, absolutely nothing,” and so we should. But what of our own inherent violence, latent and manifest. We slaughter and eat meat and call it “industry,” and then try to tell the Japanese, who are well aware of our hypocrisy, that pigs and chickens are not like whales. We drive cars and create mountains of plastic and other waste, we abuse animals and each other, etc.,all inherently violent and destructive acts. We might stop pretending we are all sweetness and light here in the “rainbow region” because we are not. We are inherently and hypocritically violent. We are Homo Sapiens after all!

I see no hypocrisy or oxymoron in a guy dressed in military fatigues smoking pot. Where is the contradiction? A lot of US Marines smoked pot in Vietnam and were stoned to the gills as they raped and murdered the Vietnamese. Cannabis might engender impulses toward love, peace and mung-beans in you and me, but it certainly does not necessarily “pacify” and “chill out” everyone as Binnah claims. Psychoactive agents possess no specific mode of action that is independent of their user, and their effects vary according to the unique interface effected between them and their imbiber.

Naive pacifism is a luxury of the contented middle classes and reeks of phoney sentimentalism and bad faith. Moreover, it plays right into the hands of the fascists. The effective and spirited opposition to the Vietnam war in the 1960’s had two major elements; anti-war activists and pacifists. The first activists to abandon an absolute pacifist moral position were those closest to the edge, those with the least to lose, those most targeted and persecuted by the police and the military, namely, the African Americans. Groups like the Black Panthers soon wearied of all that turn the other cheek rhetoric. They had had both cheeks slapped so hard and for so long they were not going to fall for that again. They quickly organised a spirited and effective and, yes, violent resistance. The white middle-class college students generally held out with the moralism and pacifism a little longer, after all, they had warm dinners and beds to go home to, and rich parents to bail them out of any trouble.

Most people, when pushed to a given limit, will abandon a moral position of absolute pacifism. They tend to do so when they realise their own inherent violence and hypocrisy; when they realise the gap between their moral position and the actualities of their behaviour. If not then, then they abandon pacifism when faced with violence and the prospect of being hurt or killed by an aggressor. It happened to me when I came to realise my own hypocrisy and violence. I drive a car, I waste resources, I leave a bigger footprint on the earth than those in the so-called “third world,” and more often than not, I let apathy and selfishness rule me and I don’t speak out against injustice. The list goes on. And when I became a father I suddenly realised there now existed at least one thing for which I would be well prepared to kill for in order to protect from a threat. And what of all the other children in Iraq being murdered and maimed by the western coalition forces? Is it enough for us to say “I am a pacifist, my hands are tied?” Is not the permitting of this tyranny and murder not just another act of violence by passivity? Is it not just cowardice disguised as pacifism? Don’t Iraqi kids matter? How passive would we be if they were our kids?

We tolerate the endless war on drugs. We turn and run and run and let the government and the police change the goal-posts on us endlessly. We allow them to criminalise us as a group and we often pretend not to notice when they drag one of our number off the streets. Now the government draws an ever longer bow, conflating the “War on Terror” with the “War On Drugs” and we all know the sub-text; “If you use pot you are a terrorist and we will take you down.” Yes, there really is a war on. The government created it ex nihilo, manufacturing crises and inventing scapegoats just as Hitler did (Reichstag Fire, Jews, etc.). It has not yet quite come to Nimbin with the ferocity of say, Latin America, but be sure, it is coming, and burying our heads in the sand will not make it magically go away.

We might condemn Ernesto ‘Che’ Geuvara de la Serna as just another killer, but to millions in Latin America he is regarded as a virtual deity, a ubiquitous symbol of unconquered defiance and resistance to Yankee imperialist tyranny. I lived in South America for two years amongst indigenous and mestizo peasants, coca-growers, corn farmers and horsemen, and navel gazing pacifism was simply not an option for them. These people live in a real world of US sponsored state terrorism under the coca-eradication program operative in such regions as the Chapare of Bolivia. They did not bring this upon themselves through “negative thinking” or some such rubbish, but rather, because they had something the Yankees want, coca, oil and timber. The US DEA, CIA and other agencies will stop at nothing to impose their monopoly on the cocaine trade in South America and will not tolerate independent players. The “War On Drugs” is nothing but a protection racquet, and they will not tolerate Nimbin’s independence for much longer.

The Bolivian peasantry have rebellion surging hot within their veins. They are courageous, well informed and right in the thick of it, and no-one can piss down their back and tell them it’s raining. What is their reward? They now have a new president, an indigenous ex-coca grower, Morales, one of their own, someone who will listen to their needs and stand up to the hegemonic mercantilist ambitions of Amerika. Someone who will say, “damn you, we have always grown coca, and if we want to, we will!” It is said that a people get the leaders they deserve. Bolivia got Morales, we get Howard. We Australians have become the most cowed, subservient, frightened, mortgage-obsessed, babied and ‘farmed’ people I can think of.

Everyone except a saint reaches a critical threshold at some point. We cling to pacifism here in Nimbin not because we are morally superior to the Bolivians, (though we might think we are), but because, quite simply, we still can. Conditions are not yet critical enough yet to get us motivated. When will we finally stand up to tyranny? When they start aerial spraying Monsanto DDT Roundup Ultra on our cannabis crops as they did with coca in Bolivia? When our animals and children start dying of herbicide poisoning? When the army and police start forcibly dispossessing us of our land because they find a natural herb they deem evil growing on it? When our every move is recorded on surveillance cameras? When the depleted uranium bombs our government allows the Americans to test in Shoalwater Bay and the central deserts start resulting in massive birth defects and other health problems for us? When our kids get charged with terrorism offences for growing pot?

Ghandi remains a great role model for me. But if I want to cling to his position of unswerving pacifism (though even he supported the British recruitment drive in India in the World War), then I must do it with the same devotion and commitment; a commitment I don’t see any of us car-driving, meat-eating, obedient, happy, well-fed consumers undertaking. And even Ghandi relied on violence to achieve his political objectives, only the bloodshed was intended to be not that of his adversaries, but rather his own and that of his followers, in public spectacles designed to horrify people into action. (Similarly, the anti-Vietnam war movement in the US hoped to galvanise a horrified television audience into action with images of their own violent persecution at the hands of the Chicago police in 1968). Ghandi’s campaign of civil disobedience was a beauty if we have the guts for it, but to go down this road we must be prepared to let our oppressors make a statement of our very flesh. I am no saint. I don’t think I would be willing to endlessly turn the other cheek as the great Mahatma did. If you have the strength to endlessly turn the other cheek as your blood runs then people will either sanctify you, declare you mad, or both. One can make a statement of their flesh like some Buddhists did in protest in the 60’s. Go right ahead if you like, but I am not into self-immolation personally, and self-violence is still violence.

I don’t think the advice given in the “Stay True” article is enough for me. We are told to just think positively and dress up like Priscilla Queen of the Desert and everything will be OK. Such talk only encourages tyrants, who just laugh at us, rub their hands together, and start believing they can get away with ever greater acts of unopposed regulation of our lives and ultra-violence.

Just do whatever is your proclivity. You can dress up, conduct Eisteddfods, resist with your poetry, your music, your fists, your spirit, whatever, but at least just own what you do, and own up to your own violence, innate or learned, that characterises our species; the sad species that continues to terrorise Mother Earth and all her myriad life-forms. We can drive to all the peace rallies we like, but remember, our very act of driving there is an act of violence. (Incidently, if you want a real oxymoron, how’s this; a peace sign on a petrol powered vehicle). We are all hypocrites, we just need to accept the fact and work from there.

I have written so many poems and songs about my yearning for peace in the world, (and in my own soul), and I will probably continue to do so. The likes of me can afford to do this; the bombs are not falling on me yet, I have land, a warm bed, warm dinners, I still have pen and paper with which to write, limbs and hands with which to write, stages on which to speak and perform, and the freedom and health to do so. For now at least it is easy to be a pacifist, it costs nothing and everyone pats you on the head and says, “what a good boy.”

P.S. The "’Hippy’ alter-native movement we are fond of grew out of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960’s and was inspired and modelled largely on certain native American ideals as enunciated by some of the inspirational orators of the Great Plains Cultures of North America like Sitting Bull, Ten Bears and Crazy Horse, who understood well the oneness and sacredness of all creation and who, it must be said, led spirited and bloody military campaigns against the invading Europeans. Lets be honest, somewhere deep in our peaceful hearts we rejoice when we read of the mighty Geronimo, Crazy Horse, the Oglala Sioux, The Cheyenne, the gutsy defeat of Long Hair Custer at the little Big Horn, and all the other occasions when tyranny was opposed. Hail Crazy Horse, hail Pemulway, hail Che!

Robert Bruce.

Hi y'all,

Christopher Pyne, parliamentary secretary to the
minister for health and ageing along with the former
health minister Tony Abbott are most concerned about
your health and mine, which is sure reassuring to
contemplate and cannabis is in his and their sights.
But interestingly enough as concerned as they
supposedly are for you and me both and our well-being,
when Abbott was health minister just a few short
months ago ACA ran a story about a highly qualified
Perth-based surgeon named Dr John Holt who many
believe can cure cancer with his 'radio-wave therapy
treatment'. Remember the story? (Link below. If it
doesn't work, email me and I'll send it.) Abbott at
the time said / promised he'd look into this simple
yet revolutionary treatment, but then Ray Martin (ACA
presenter at the time; now we've got the gorgeous
Tracy) reported back Abbott had gone stone cold on Dr
Holt's treatment even though many of Holt's former
patients swore black and blue the good doctor had
indeed cured them of the dreaded life-threatening
condition that cancer can be!

Okay here's the link to Dr Holt's revolutionary cancer
treatment story; enjoy:
http://aca.ninemsn.com.au/stories/1744.asp

And ah, who wants to volunteer to email this
first-rate fool Chris Pyne and including the silly
health minister as well with this link to Dr
Grinspoon's webpage 'Shared Comments and Observations
- From Our Visitors' at:
http://rxmarijuana.com/comments_and_observations.htm

Further, and so it seems the new head honcho currently
entrenched in parliament house Sydney, some
insignificant dude named Iemma, is likewise a bit of a
first-rate goose too with a news item overnight on 2GB
radio (broadcast at midnight; they sure as hell know
when I'm listening!) that anyone caught using or
growing pot could not only face a soul-destroying
life-threatening career-ruining jail term but also
suffer a budget destroying half-million dollar penalty
for daring to shun over-the-counter prescription
medication which the local GP insists is 'the best
medicine for you!' (Guess it's also tied in with the
North American trade deal thing that Johnny signed on
our behalf with the Yanks.) So what we need then in
this state - the premier state, right?! - is an
equivalent to California's 'Proposition 215' for our
medical rights. We're still a democracy and they
haven't and won't succeed in ever closing down free
speech no matter what draconian legislation the pricks
scheme and dream up together.

Best to you all,

Mel Brubeck

PS It's the old story, united we stand, divided we
don't stand a fighting chance! We CAN beat the
bastards!

http://www.health.gov.au/internet/ministers/publishing etc

22 January 2006
CP002/06

The Parliamentary Secretary for Health, Christopher
Pyne, today called for each state government to re
criminalise the possession and consumption of
cannabis.

Speaking at the National Young Liberal Convention in
Sydney, Mr Pyne said there was a growing body of
evidence that showed a link between cannabis
consumption and serious mental health problems.

"Young people are particularly vulnerable and we must
do more to tackle the perception that cannabis is a
harmless drug," Mr Pyne said.

"In Australia in 2004, 15 per cent of our population
over the age of 15 years used cannabis.

"In a list of 24 of our national contemporaries such
as the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United
States of America and New Zealand, Australia ranked
the highest in cannabis use.

"Cannabis use can lead to the exacerbation of
psychotic illness and symptoms of schizophrenia as
well as mood swings, panic attacks, delusions,
hallucinations and paranoid thinking.

"A recent study conducted in the United Kingdom found
that one in four people may have a genetic profile
that makes it more likely that cannabis use will
trigger psychotic disorders. There are also other
important research findings that I have formed an
Expert Committee to examine," he said.

The Australian Institute of Criminology reported in
October 2005 that 94 per cent of juvenile offenders
had used cannabis. And while alcohol use was slightly
more prevalent (97 per cent), more juveniles regularly
used cannabis (63 per cent) compared with alcohol (46
per cent). The drugs most commonly used by young
people prior to offending were cannabis and
amphetamines.

"The Australian Government has undertaken a
significant Tough on Drugs campaign and the most
recent phase included advertisements that targeted the
use of cannabis and focussed on the links with mental
health and social isolation," Mr Pyne said.

"The government has taken considerable steps toward
raising community awareness about the dangers of
cannabis. But we need the state and territory
governments to come on board with appropriate legal
sanctions," he said.

In November 2005 the Ministerial Council on Drug
Strategy (MCDS) agreed to the development of the
National Cannabis Strategy. A report is due with the
MCDS early this year, and it is expected to outline
measures to tackle the problem of cannabis use in
Australia.

Media contact: Adam Howard 0400 414 833