“They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are”

Dr. Cornell West

“I’ve been spiritually breakdancing on the way here”

1/ Occupy Wall St. grew organically from the NYC community, this is its inherent strength.

Every other “occupy” is just an internet fad, mimicking what what the Americans do in the (new social) media. This is its inherent weakness.

The internet occupy movement is totally vulnerable to astro-turfing and conflict propagation programs by state, corporate and ideological groups. Such manipulation and distraction by enemies of the movement is already obvious in the Australian online discussions.

We have recently seen the internet manipulation of the Australian (and most other “western” nations) peace movement and political left to itself become the frontline of the war machine’s propaganda machine justifying NATO’s war on Libya. The broader occupy movement is vulnerable to the same thing.

(google – “Pentagon persona program”. If the Pentagon is doing it you can bet the private corporations are too)

2/ Occupy Wall St. is tackling issues of racism and colonisation within itself through agencies such as the P.O.C. (people of colour) working group and the “Occupy the hood” movement. The diverse New York community including Africans, Chicano and native Americans are represented in Occupy Wall St.

The Occupy Wall St. P.O.C. working group and occupy the hood are not liason committees, not the occupation’s outreach to “other” communities. They are self empowered agencies of non-Anglo New York communities insisting that the agendas and modes of manifestation of the core of the movement represents the lowest socio-economic portion of the 99%.

This connection to P.O.C. agendas is of itself a transformative program, the nature of “the movement” itself is changing through education and extending networks, just as the new left of the 1960s changed through exposure to the black civil rights movement.

Across America, there has been some conflict as the non-anglo groups flex their muscle in the movement, or in some cases even dare to show up to a meeting or post an opinion on a facebook page. However the issues of racism and colonisation are firmly on the table because of the self activity of P.O.C. communities.

However in Australian internet discussions, such issues of the cultural homogeneity of the movement, its objectives and who it really represents does not seem to have been a serious issue of consideration.

I do notice that there have been various acknowledgements of traditional owners and I believe Melbourne and Sydney have indigenous liason groups. However this is not the same as a movement inherently relevant to the agenda’s of the local underclass, people whose interests cannot be represented by the usual class of self appointed advocates of the 99%.

Occupy Wall St. is defining itself by its own internal processes, the general assemblies and working groups. This self defining is grappling with issues of racism and colonisation because there are people of colour central to the movement and the New York community.

It seems that the apparent cultural homogeneity of the Australian movement has restricted the self definition of general assemblies to mundane organising tasks or platitudes – a process without substance.

A lot of commentators are saying Australia is different to the U.S. because the Australian economy is in better shape than the U.S.’s. While this may be true, a more significant difference between the U.S. and Australia is its cultural composition. In the US, African slaves and Chicano cheap labour has been imported for hundreds of years, their descendants constituting a large part of the U.S. demographic, especially in New York. Black perspective is acknowledged as part of American society, even if begrudgingly by some. Shit, they even got a black president.

However in Australia, up to 90% of the indigenous population were wiped out by smallpox, guns and poison food and water, just like indigenous Americans. Some South Pacific slaves were imported for a while but the white Australia policy, the central pillar of the new Australian federation, deported all foreign black labour. Surviving Aboriginal people were systematically rounded up onto reserves or state regulated rural slavery programs – a long way from the developing urban centres, until the 1970s in Qld.

Australian conciousness has developed as white colonial culture (not skin colour). Multiculturalism since the 70s has simple offered equality of all ethnicities within the white culture established in the 200 previous years. This is the purported cultural framework of the 99%.

In the U.S. millions of people were suffering poverty before the 2008 GFC. These people have been hit worst by the GFC. This underclass is a more significant section of U.S. society, especially New York, than it is in Australia. As such, Australia cannot maintain the fire started at New York because it lacks the involvement of the oppressed underclass.

If, hypothetically, the Australian “occupy” movement were to seriously apply itself to the needs and agendas of Australia’s underclass within the 99%, then perhaps the imposition of a New York template – tents in park near financial district, live streaming and general assembly democracy, etc. – might not be appropriate to the local circumstance. Perhaps some more basic discussions, perhaps in comfortable surrounds, would need to occur to harness the power and momentum of what is already occurring on the ground in our own communities, and how our pre-existing community movements might better pursue our own agendas and expand them rather than just mimicking the Americans. Perhaps if we were to engage with Aboriginal people, our own assumptions of what democratic process is might have to be flexible enough to accommodate eldership and tribal hierarchies inherent in Aboriginal cultural and political processes. The very notion of the 99% “owning” public space is an assertion of colonial rule that dismisses Aboriginal cultural perspective. Until the sovereign authority of Aboriginal families to any place is incorporated into a new democratic process (not just token acknowledgement of traditional ownership), then the new occupation is the same as the old occupation of Aboriginal land.

3/ Melbourne and Sydney have created for themselves a local issue – civil liberties and the right to protest. This is bourgeoise politics, the issue is the suppression of middle class dissidents and not the nature of the police and the state. The violence of the police towards demonstrators is tame compared to the business as usual policing of Aboriginal communities and individuals across the nation including the inner city of Melbourne and Sydney. Police violence towards the mentally ill, including lethal violence, too is business as usual. The prison system that millions of Australians experience as inmates or families of inmates, is brutal, systematic, dysfunctional violence. The occupy movement, like so many bourgeoise Australian leftist movements before it, has focussed on the rights of the middle class to engage in political narrative rather than challenge the deep rooted systemic violence of the status-quo. This is an indication of the irrelevance of this movement to the the real issues of domination in this country.

“I can’t believe this can happen in Melbourne” one bloodied protestor proclaimed to a television camera. I guess that depends on where you fit into Melbourne society, there are many who are all too well aware of the political violence of the police and its role in dominating and repressing sections of society.

The Australian ethos is anti-racist, within its own definitions of what racism is. Australia’s anti-discrimination laws affirm all Australians’ right to be white (culture, not skin colour), equal under the sovereign legal and parliamentary system modeled on the English law. All rights and interests outside the white law including rights specifically attributable to an ethnic group such as rights inherent in Aboriginal customary law, are considered discriminatory, therefore illegal. The High Court of Australia relies on anti-discrimination legislation in its blanket extinguishment of Aboriginal customary law as a law pertaining to a particular race.

Notions of “racism”. “equality” and “justice” that are constructed within the cultural and legal frameworks of the dominant colonial society will only affirm colonial domination, whether those frameworks are conservative, liberal democratic or radical socialist.

I claim the socialist tradition in Australia, including its anti-racism campaigns, is as much a part of colonisation of this Aboriginal country as the church and state have been.

My first critique of the radical left is a general one, not specific to Aboriginal issues, is that it tends to present a philosophical critique of history without any real engagement with historical forces.


When the radical left does attempt to engage in historical force, be it the union movement, the Aboriginal movement, the environment movement, the peace movement, local communities etc. it does so by way of recruiting to its philosophy over and above any inherent agendas of those movements, using the real struggles of other men and women as exemplary platforms for its own ideological evangelism rather than joining and supporting those struggles on their own terms.


I endorse Marx’s famous statement “religion is the opiate of the masses”. This of course was not an arrogant proposition of atheism as it is too often used, it was a critical analysis of the consciousness of the oppressed/dispossessed person and the illusions they embrace to channel the pain of their historical circumstance – “its (religion’s) universal basis of consolation and justification”.


But today in Australia the church does not have the same social role as it had in 19th century Europe. Today hardly anyone takes the church seriously. Modern capitalism has provided a myriad of other opiates to replicate the historical escapist purpose of the church.


One of the opiates that has replaced religion today is ideological politics which has created an escapist etherial framework by which to explain existential angst. Ideological politics has developed a program of rituals (protest campaigns) that serve no purpose but “consolation and justification” of its members, just as the 19th century European church did.

Ideological politics, including classical notions of class struggle, has become a mechanism of detachment from history rather than a mechanism of clearly seeing it and engaging with it. Political power has been replaced by political opinion.

The fundamental flaw of the Australian socialist movement has been its religious commitment to the working class as the holy class of history and the primary agency of historical change. This has made Australian radicalism blind to the historical experience and latent power of Australia’s underclass of slaves, rural peasants and the urban unemployed.

Today the working class is affluently numb, dependently tied to capitalist objectives through the new unionism, superannuation investments and home mortgages. Only the underclass has an inherent motivation to seek to change the status-quo and has nothing to lose, this is where dialectical leadership is.

Marx, Engels and Lenin all identified the urban working class as the primary agents of history. They rejected the notions of land rights held by indigenous peasants, dismissing them as either bourgeois notions of private property or historically anachronistic elements of a less evolved society. Lenin saw peasants only in terms of potential workers. When the needs of rural peasants clashed with those of the urban working class in Revolutionary Russia, the needs of the working class took precedence in all cases. The Red Army killed over six million indigenous Russian Peasants by taking their food from them to feed the army and industrial workers.


The Aboriginal worker is a new phenomenon in Australia and still a minority of the whole Aboriginal nation. Prior to the invasion Aboriginal people were not workers, they were owners of the means of production engaging in a free market. Since the invasion Aboriginal people have been the lumpen proletariate – either unemployed, slaves or the small few that managed to survive on their land one way or another – rural peasants. Except for the minority of Aboriginal workers today, the bulk of Aboriginal Australia are still the lumpen proletariate.


The basic Marxist class framework does not come from the historical experience of Aboriginal Australia and ignores or excludes the relevance of the lumpen proletariate in the historical dialectic – therefore dismissing Aboriginal power except as assimilated workers.


The white worker/activist is of a different class and historical experience, by Marxist definition, to the Aboriginal masses. Historical material engagement with Aboriginal Australia is not a matter of class solidarity as proclaimed by the radical left but inter-class relationship. Defining Aboriginal people and history as working class, as today’s left does, in the context of a clear and obvious class divide is as patronising as it is naive.


I am not saying throw the Marxist baby out with the bathwater. The baby is the absolute, universal truth of dialectical historical materialism. This is the way, the truth and the life! 
The bathwater is the cultural circumstance and scientific theory to which comrades Karl and Fred theoretically applied this basic truth, that is – the status-quo consciousness of bourgeoise urban European society and racist social Darwinism, the latter being the basis of Marx and Engel’s historical science and evidence of the working class as the midwifery of history.


To engage with the historical circumstance of Aboriginal Australia within an intellectual framework of dialectical historical materialism does require an abandonment of the ideological assumptions and traditions of the European working class, including the the primacy of the urban working class and irrelevancy of the Lumpen proletariate as agents of historical change. Yet the radical left clings to these things as the philosophical basis of its political existence.


European socialist thought based on the historical pre-eminence of the working class is racist.

The white Australia policy was born at the Eureka Stockade, institutionalised in the great shearers strike and legislated by the ALP. Racism is the cultural heritage of the Australian left.

The racism of Australian socialism has been denied, repressed, justified and euphamised in exactly the same way as right wing Australia has jingoistically denied the truth of where it comes from.

The Australian Aboriginal struggles of the late twentieth century demanded land rights, self determination and an independent economic base. The goal was ownership of the means of production, not workers’ rights. Socialist ideology has perceived and portrayed the Aboriginal struggle in terms of mainstream political constructs such as equal wages, equal rights and anti-racism and consequently failed to understand or embrace the essence of the Aboriginal struggle in its own historical materialist, economic terms.

Perhaps the first major positive engagement of the Australian Left with the Aboriginal struggle was the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and aligned unions’ campaign for equal wages for Aboriginal stock-workers that coincided with the Gurindgi strike and walk off in 1966. The Gurindgi were demanding land rights. The CPA and unions were demanding equal wages.

The union campaign was successful and hailed by the left as a great victory. However the consequences were that Aboriginal stock-workers were sacked as bosses chose to hire white workers if they had to pay white wages. The racism of white Australia was not factored into the equal wages plan. The Gurindgi and stock-workers across the country were dispossessed of the land on which they had previously lived and worked. The circumstance of the Aboriginal stock-worker changed from a traditional owner living on and taking care of their country, able to hunt and gather to survive beyond rations, to a town fringe-dweller either unemployed or part of a constant pool of casual labour to be picked up and dropped off when needed.

What the left celebrated as a victory in their own terms of reference was in fact a major setback to the material and cultural wellbeing of Aboriginal people. The victory, from the Gurindgi point of view, was the handing back of their land by Gough Whitlam which had nothing to do with equal wages but was more to do with the Gurindgi becoming owners of the means of production and engaging in the economy as capitalists, not workers or slaves.

There is no doubt that the mass support in white urban Australia that was generated by the CPA and unions was a major contribution to Whitlam’s Gurindgi handover and Fraser’s enactment of the Northern Territory Land Rights Act – I do not want to underplay the significance of this or leave it out of the story. However Northern Territory land rights was in essence an unintended by-product of the left’s equal wages campaign and came about by the Gurindgi using the left as a platform for their own agendas and priorities, not a success of the plans and perspectives of the left itself.

Despite the victories of land rights legislation in the Northern Territory, Aboriginal stock-workers in every other state were dispossessed from their lands by the equal wages victory.

From the Gurindgi walk-off until the Bicentennial protests of 1988, the CPA and aligned unions maintained strong connections in Aboriginal Australia and played key support roles in all of the land rights protests of the 1970s and 80s. The CPA played a leadership role in recruiting the broad church of the left into the Aboriginal movement.

The last great campaign of the CPA, before it began imploding, was their de-colonisation workshop campaign that educated union groups, women’s groups, church groups, university groups etc., especially in Qld but I believe it occurred in Sydney, Melbourne, Alice Springs and elsewhere too. These workshops were about identifying colonial assumptions and frameworks in ourselves and being able to look at the Aboriginal struggle on its own terms without colonial filters.

These workshops were not philosophical adventurism, they arose out of the real historical engagement of the left with Aboriginal Australia over two decades and the needs identified by Aboriginal people and leftists working together in political struggle.

While “de-colonisation” became the correct line and dominant framework for left involvement in the Aboriginal protests of the 1980s, this new evolution of Australian socialism was aborted with the demise of the CPA and the consequent atrophying of its networks shortly afterward.

At least in regards to the Aboriginal struggle, and probably across the board, I believe the collapse of the CPA networks deprived the Left of its eldership and collective memory. The lessons learnt, the systems developed, the personal connections built over time have now gone.

Today the radical Left and the moderate Left including the Greens, unions and neo-Trotskysist grouplets have all evolved largely independently from the continuity and momentum of the Left movement that engaged with Aboriginal Australia in the second half of the twentieth century. Different people, different organisations, different histories. Of course there are many elder individuals who maintain friendships born of the struggles of the 1970s, 80s and 90s but these connections remain personal rather than manifesting in cross-cultural political power as they did last century.

Today the Australian left has incorporated Aboriginal issues such as deaths in custody, the NT intervention and “close the gap” into its overall canon of slogans and campaigns. It has framed the suffering and circumstance of Aboriginal Australia within its own ideological frameworks and modes of operation, just as patronising white supporters did in the 1960s in organisations such as the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) that campaigned for the minimal and tokenistic changes of the 1967 referendum. The white ideological control of the black agenda had to be transcended in order for the black leadership to arrive at demands outside the dominant paradigm such as land rights, self determination and an independent economic base.

Just as the white left had to learn to work with and take direction from an autonomous Aboriginal leadership and agendas in the 1970s and 80s, today’s left needs to learn anew how to engage meaningfully with Aboriginal Australia on Aboriginal Australia’s own terms. It needs to spend as much time organising in Aboriginal communities as it does in universities, under the leadership of Aboriginal people rather than white ideologues and bureaucrats. From this organising it will have the direct experience to understand the Aboriginal struggle and help deliver its demands to the broader society. Without such real and direct engagement in Aboriginal life, the left are just as ignorant as the rest of society and its grasp of Aboriginal issues will necessarily be shallow and tokenistic.

The central issue of the relationship between the working class left and Aboriginal society is not cross-cultural awareness. While this is an important issue it is not really difficult to deal with. The main obstacle to the left’s relevant engagement with Aboriginal Australia is class – the different life circumstance and perspectives of the relatively affluent working class and the extreme poverty of the Aboriginal underclass. The left’s so-called solidarity is really just parasitic commentary on the suffering of Aboriginal people, a voyeuristic cerebral acknowledgement of pain not unlike the church’s prayers. When pain and suffering as well as dollars and resources are shared equally, or at least just a bit, between affluent workers and the Aboriginal underclass, then there will be a real understanding of what solidarity means.

At present the broad left, from liberals to revolutionaries objectify Aboriginal suffering as a welfare or justice policy issue. Instead of forging real sharing relationships between workers and Aboriginal people, the left campaigns for more social workers and welfare services or legislative change of some sort. Engagement with the real suffering of real people is not a relevant consideration for the political left, only the opinions and policy about that suffering are embraced.

The Australian left needs to return to the drawing board for its basic ideological framework and its program of action if it has any intention of being relevant to the Aboriginal struggle. If however it is content to offer detached ideological commentary about Aboriginal suffering, nothing needs to change as it is doing this quite effectively now.

John Tracey

In 166 B.C, two hundred years before the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, there was a rebellion in Judea that overthrew the Hellenist (Greko-Roman or “gentile”) Seleucid empire that continued in the colonising tradition of Alexander the Great, that is it imposed Greek social structure, economy and religion onto Judea at the same time as outlawing indigenous Hebrew culture, especially the Jubilee year of restoration (Leviticus 25), Sabbath laws and the land covenant of circumcision. Idols of Zeus were placed in Solomons temple in Jerusalem.

The indigenous Hebrews launched a guerilla war against the colonising Greek army and economy as well as Hellinised (civilised) Hebrews collaborating with the Greek regime. The gentiles were expelled from Judea and indigenous self-rule was instituted in Judea, Galilee, Samaria and other regions of Abraham and Joshua’s covenants, in the form of a priestly dynasty – the Hasmoneans. The old testament books of Maccabees tell the story. The festival of Hanukkah or “the festival of light” is a celebration of the rededication of Solomon’s temple after its defilement by the colonising Greeks. Jesus attended this festival and declared himself the messiah at it (John 10: 22 – 30).

Rome invaded the Holy land in 63 BC, after a hundred years of indigenous self-rule. However Rome did not outlaw Hebrew culture and law as the Greeks had done, instead it ruled in collaboration with the Hasmonean priests. The priests accepted Rome’s money to refurbish and expand Solomon’s temple. The temple itself became the centre of Roman tax collection and the priests compromised indigenous law, especially the Jubilee, in order to maintain peace with the Roman colonisers. This arrangement is the religious and political status-quo of the new testament.

Thirty years or so after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, in the 60s AD, indigenous Hebrews again launched a guerrilla war of independence, in this case against Roman domination. The Romans were evicted, self rule was instituted in Judea, Galilee and Samaria, based in the religious authorities in Jerusalem. Revolutionary Hebrew coins (“freedom coins”) were minted to replace the Roman economy and land and wealth redistribution occurred in line with tribal Jubilee law, as documented in the book of Acts.

In 70 AD Rome re-invaded and smashed the Jerusalem temple but Hebrew guerilla resistance continued for a hundred years.

The new testament was written during and/or after the revolution of the 60s and the whole new testament was written in the time of guerilla resistance and Rome’s persecution of the Hebrews as a result. That is, the events of the revolution and ongoing guerilla war would be well known by the bible writers and those to whom they wrote, it was the social context of the new testament. Domination by and liberation from the colonial empires of Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome is the social and historical context of the whole bible.

What can be solidly argued from the biblical texts is Jesus identification with the old testament prophetic tradition of resistance to empire.

What can also be solidly argued from the biblical texts is Jesus’ direct engagement with the issues and debates of his own time regarding the attempted fusion of God’s law and Caesar’s law by the priests (Pharisees and Sadducees). For example – there was a popular Babylonian born (Hellenised) Pharisee named Hillel at the time of Herod the Great, that is at the time of Jesus’ birth. Hillel was instrumental in abandoning the Jubilee law, the restoration of land to traditional owners and the extinguishment of debt. Such an arrangement is of course not compatible with the Roman colonial economy and was a direct threat to Rome’s capacity to extract wealth, which is why the Greeks outlawed it. Jesus proclamation of the Jubilee in his first announcement of his ministry was a direct engagement in the social debate of indigenous self rule and colonial domination. His constant attack on the pharisees must be understood in the context of the Hasmonean collaboration with Rome.

But unfortunately Christendom has established a tradition of interpreting the bible through the lens of Hellenic imperial Rome and as such betrayed the tribal indigenous perspective of the bible writers.

Even radical biblical archaeologists like John Domonic Crossan, whose work I would still recommend to anyone, interpret the new testament through the lens of Roman history, culture and debates within the Hellenic empire rather than the sociopolitical realities of Africa and the Middle East upon which the bible stories are founded.

John Tracey

Once a Jolly protester
camped by a helicopter
under the shade of total surveillance

And he spruiked and rode
and smashed his mattock on the Helicopter
Who’l come a tricycling Matilda with me

I was inspired by the Rockhampton airport “plowshares” action but not I suspect in the ways that the protagnists were intending to inspire. I do not think much of the broader plowshares movement or the philosophy of Christian non-violence, as I will shortly expound upon. However, the Rockhampton plowshares action was sufficiently unorthodox within these tradition to allow it to be perceived by some other measure. And I did.

Bryan Law used creative public drama to become part of Australia’s folklore. Whether or not he will be commemorated in the fashion that Frenchy Hoffmeister (the “jolly swagman”) or Ned Kelly have been I cannot say, but I have been inspired by the story of Bryan for the same reasons that stories of Frenchy and Ned have inspired me.

Ned’s Irish socialist rhetoric reeks of gunpowder and blood. Frenchy’s ghost may be heard as you pass by the billabong but if you listen closely you will also hear in the distance gunfire of the striking shearers. There is nothing in the historical narratives of Ned and Frenchy to conform to the ideological template of Christian non-violence as espoused by Bryan, but that doesn’t matter. They are all Australian folkloric archetypes of rebellion, reinforcing the innate urge to rebellion in all who hear the stories.

What inspires me about Bryan’s mattock-bashing is simply rebellion – the basic urge to resist oppression and hypocrisy, the human capacity of dignity above and beyond fear of the consequences of non-conformity. That is where the spirit of God is and it is a spirit that can be felt by any person anywhere in any context where oppression and hypocrisy exists.

Bryan, Ned and Frenchy are all non-Aboriginal people who have stepped outside of the culture and structure of the colonial society and as such are mythical role models for non-Aboriginal people within the collective Australian narrative. I am also inspired by Aboriginal warriors such as Dundalli, Pemulwuy, the Kalkadoon resistance, Pastor Don Brady, Denis Walker who have stayed strong to their culture and tradition including strategic conflict with the colonial state without fear of the consequences.

Aboriginal warriors including the ones I mentioned are not called warriors for nothing, they all at different times advocated and used violence against the colonial state. A Christian non-violence framework must necessarily conclude that this history is morally wrong and certainly should not be glorified. However the Aboriginal community across the continent have embraced this history as morally good and indeed glorified it. I do too, just as the bible glorifies indigenous guerilla wars against invading empires.

There are other tricky issues with regard to Christian non-violence reconciling with Aboriginal perspective including violence used in forgiveness ceremonies (wrongly called pay-back), and the non-consensual genital mutilation of minors (initiation circumcision just like in the bible) for which there is simply no ideological reconciliation with philosophical non-violence, yet a reconciliation (or more accurately first conciliation) with Aboriginal cultural perspectives is necessary for peace in this land, a real peace that includes no more Aboriginal deaths in custody not just more social workers. The reconciliation is spiritual – earth, sky, birth, death, love, rebellion: not moral or ideological conformity.

If the cultural perspective of Aboriginal Australia is overtly or euphamisticaly dismissed as violent and therefore evil, this demonisation is no different to the missionary church of empire that declared Aboriginal culture inherently evil, a process of cultural colonisation.

Bryan’s helicopter-bash occurred in the context of a broader Christian non-violence campaign including other forms of protest at the Talisman Sabre military exercises at Rockhampton and civil disobedience at Swan Island military base in Victoria. These broader campaigns have not inspired me.

The ideology of Christian non-violence, as manifested in recent protests, appeals to the most basic naive, minimalistic mainstream frameworks such as “peace” and “justice”.

The form of Christianity embraced by the Christian non-violence movement is the same, but slightly modified at the edges, ideological framework that has underpinned the development of western civilisation and modern imperial power. The protestors and the mainstream authorities share the same cultural heritage, the so-called “judeo-christian ethic” which has nothing at all to do with Judaism or Jesus and would be better described as the Greko-Roman ethic.

Christian non-violence affirms and supports the cultural underpinnings of the beast it protests about, it is itself a part of the beast, it dovetails with it. It is not rebellion but a calling for a return to the essence of the status-quo.

The sombre ritualism of American plowshares tradition and much of the Christian non-violence movement’s “public liturgy” is deliberately based on the ecclesiastic traditions and philosophies of the Roman and Holy Roman empires. The protestant protestors may modernise their symbols a little but still operate within a framework of symbolism that conforms to the cultural base of imperial Christendom. Bryan’s symbols of a big hat, a tricycle and a mattock and the choreography of these symbols was a pleasant relief from the funerary norm of christian protest.

The Jesus of the bible was a tribal indigenous Jew that resisted Rome, which it seems to me to have absolutely nothing to do with the Jesus of the Roman religion that has given divine authority to global empires, wars and social workers since the fourth century. Yet the Christian non-violence movement appears to embrace the Jesus tradition passed to them by empire including the theology of civil passivity – the attribution of moral value (“good”) to detached inactivity.

The cultural underpinning of civil passivity is concomitant to the state’s exclusive authority to use violence, they are the two sides of the same coin. I say, Christian non-violence has embraced this mainstream cultural norm and modified it to its logical conclusion – pacifism or philosophical non-violence. They have developed an ethic from within the empire instead of transcending the culture of empire.

The spirit of God, of the land, of the sky is not found in the traditions and cultural assumptions of the empire. The imperial religion has invoked another kind of spirit, an escapist illusion to evade the hard realities of the spirit of God. The spirit of God is found in more primitive realities, the earth and sky themselves not temple orthodoxy; birth and death, not notions of afterlife; love and rebellion not ethical frameworks and moral traditions. A sick old man in a big hat riding a red tricycle defeated the biggest military machine in the world, that is where the spirit of God is found, not in any articulation of ideology.

I would like to chastise, in the strongest possible terms, the Christian non-violence movement for bastardising the bible. Christians of all political pursuasions have cherry-picked and de-contextualised isolated passages of the bible to justify their various ideologies and to date the Christian non-violence movement has done exactly this also.

There are many bible passages routinely rolled out to provide spiritual authority to the ideology of non-violence that need to be tackled but that is beyond the scope of this reflection. I will however specifically look at the books of Isaiah and Micah from which the “swords into plowshares” movement claim a prophetic mandate to ideological non-violence.

For a start, if one bothers to read the books rather than just the nice verse, one will notice that the peace referred to is between “Israel”, that is the northern kingdom of Israel also called Samaria and “Judah” the southern province of which Jerusalem is centre. The prophecy is a call to tribal unity in the land of Abraham’s covenant. The enemies of these people, the imperial armies and economies of Assyria, were to either make peace with God in Zion or be destroyed by sword and fire, which is what actually happened in the Maccabees revolt. The Maccabees revolt was celebrated by Jesus at the festival of light/Hanukkah (John 10) without any commentary of the violence of the expulsion of the Greeks, only participation in the celebration of their expulsion.

Micah 4:13 (the same chapter as the swords into plowshares passage) “The Lord says,   ”People of Zion, get up  and crush your enemies. 
      I will make you like a threshing ox.  I will give you iron horns and bronze hoofs. 
      So you will crush many nations.” 
   They got their money in the wrong way. 
      But you will set it apart to the Lord. 
   You will give their wealth to the Lord of the whole earth.”

A pacifist reading of Isaiah and Micah is just enculturated distortion and misrepresentation of the story. I urge those who mouth the words “swords into plowshares” to properly read the prophets to understand what they meant by it. If you disagree with it, leave it alone but give some respect to the integrity of the story on its own terms.

Jesus locates himself as the fulfillment of the prophets. When he says in Matthew 10: 34 “Do not think that I came to bring peace to the earth. I didn’t come to bring peace. I came to bring a sword.” he is clearly alligning himself with the indigenous resistance to empire. This does not suggest that Jesus’ intent was to begin a violent revolution for the bible clearly shows that he did not. It does however undermine any suggestion that an ethic of non-violence was paramount – or even a small part – of the gospel of Jesus.

Isaiah and Micah, like all the bible prophets, tell a story of tribal unity, indigenous land rights and of invasion, exile and liberation from the military and economic empires of Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome. This story has great depth of meaning including relevance to Australia today yet the message of the prophets has been dumbed down by the Christian non-violence movement and packaged as a non-violence platitude in exactly the same way that the church of empire has and does dumb down and misrepresent the bible to give some spiritual authority to its ideology.

To conclude, let me specify that this reflection is not a call to arms or any kind of violence. It is a call to abandon philosophical template of violence and non violence as the mechanism for both understanding the world (and the bible) and engaging with it. Its all a bit more complicated than a simplistic moral dichotomy. The book of genesis describes the causal factor of original sin as eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge of good and evil is traditional Hellenistic dualism, the philosophy of gentile empires from Egypt to Rome to England to the US.

What else has the imperial church done except preach the knowledge of good and evil?

What else has the Christian non-violence movement done other than preach the knowledge of good and evil?

The spirit of god manifests in multidimensional dialectics, not moral dichotomy.

John Tracey

p.s. If anyone is curious about the relationship between Samaria or “Israel” and Judah and the story of the fracturing of the tribal unity after the David/Solomon kingdom and the Assyrian occupation and exile, the books of Kings (in the Old Testament) tell the story. This is is essential to understand not just the overarching narratives of the Old Testament prophets but also the meaning of Jesus’ gospel which is built entirely around Old Testament reference and allusion.

p.p.s.
“A New Australian Theology”

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Discussion of the issues at “Workers Bush Telegraph” (comments run from bottom to top) – A Message from the Warlpiri People

In support of Bess Nungarrayi Price

Sir – This is an open letter to those who think they know us better than we do
ourselves.

We are Warlpiri people from the communities of Yuendumu, Wirliyajarrayi,
Lajamanu and Nyirrpi as well as the town camps of Alice Springs.

Bess Nungarrayi Price is with us today to say goodbye to one of our lost children. We are sorry and in mourning. Bess Nungarrayi is one of us. She was born here at Yuendumu and grew up here. We are all family to her. It makes us sad and angry when we hear that white people and town Aboriginal people in Sydney and in Alice Springs are insulting Bess and telling lies about her. When you insult her you insult all of us, we are her family.

Nungarrayi lives in Alice Springs but she talks to us all the time. She listens to what we tell her. Many of our people also live on the town camps in Alice Springs. Barbara Shaw does not lead them, she doesn’t speak our language. Nungarrayi always does her best to help any of us when we are in trouble. We support her in her struggle to make life better for us.

We are hurt and angry now by the things that these people have been saying.
Aboriginal people should know better than to hurt people who are in sorry business. No white person knows us better than Bess does. We don’t know who this Snowy River woman who calls herself Nampijinpa. We don’t know Marlene Hodder. They don’t speak our language like Nungarrayi does. They don’t know what is in our minds and hearts like Nungarrayi does. These people should apologise to her and to us, her family, for the things they have been saying.

More than 120 signatures are in the possession of the Alice Springs News. They are available from piiji@bigpond.net.au

Dr. John Breeding – Helping People w/ Psychology Issues & Mental Health Problems

Dr. John Breeding – Psychology of Change & Personal Transformation

What is this Christmas thing that the Christian church holds as so important? There is no Christmas in the bible. There is however Hanukah – the festival of light – that celebrates the rededication of the Jerusalem temple after its defilement by invading Hellenist imperial forces. The festival of light occurs at various times in December, depending on the year as the Hebrew calendar is lunar as opposed to Rome’s solar matrix.

John 10 tells us that Jesus participated in the festival of light, indeed that is where he declared himself as Messiah before the skeptical temple authorities.

The Roman Christmas festival is a re-branding of various Hellenist festivals including the (virgin) birth of deities such as Mithra and Sol Invictus that occurred on December 25 in pre-christian Rome.

The irony of the Christian church’s embrace of Christmas is that its roots lie in the same Hellenic culture and tradition as the invaders of Judea that defiled the Jerusalem temple and whose eviction from Israel is celebrated in the festival of light.

The birth of Jesus is recorded in the bible – the nativity story. Jesus was born in the context of rule under King Herod the Great, a fraudulent and corrupt king of the Jews who operated a puppet regime of Rome and redeveloped the Jerusalem temple with Rome’s loot. The baby Jesus is born a king by way of his authentic descent from King David, a terrible threat to the sovereignty of Herod and for which the massacre of the innocents was ordered.

The nativity story, just like the festival of light, is a story of indigenous sovereignty and its assertion under imperial domination. This has somehow been white-washed from Christendom’s retelling of the story.