The Pipeline (pt 2)

 He stared at the bottle of panadol in his hand.  We stared at him.

We offered to take it from him.

He stared at the bottle.

He said he needed help.  He said he was addicted.  Addicted to what?  Addicted to taking the panadol.

He was homeless, out of work, recently divorced.

It was easy to get annoyed at him.  His issues were problematised, the solutions seemed obvious.

He stared at the bottle.

He was lost, you could tell by looking at him.  At once he needed help, and at once all options seemed closed to him, such that the most reliable choice, perhaps the only choice left to him was to be found in those pills.

He didn't give us the bottle.

I never did find out if he turned up for therapy.

***

Our modern psychiatric institutions are obsessed with trauma.  And no wonder!  Is there any age as traumogenic as ours?

Trauma, insults upon ourselves and the image of ourselves, abounds.  From the blows struck against us both physically and psychologically, to our inability to dream the world anew, is there any doubt that world as it has been constructed instils within its peoples and its nations a state of permanent threats?

In the moment of colonisation - that phenomena which has dominated our modern world - nationalist movements invariably sprung up amongst the colonised.  These movements were an inversion of European logics - the Europeans, justifying their actions by claiming to uplift the peoples of the world, were now confronted with mass movements that used proclaimed the necessity of European-esque structures to defend themselves from the Europeans.

Who could blame these anti-colonialists?  If one wishes to have bounded borders, if one wishes to become intelligible to the global community, there is no easier vehicle to do so than with the state.  If one wishes to mobilise the masses, to tie their fates inextricably with the state, then what better way to do so than the nation state?

But in this sense, the colonial project has been remarkably successful.  You will hear the world over about the rights of states to exist, and the world over, decolonial movements have been marked by nationstate formation.  Even nominally "anti-state" structures - the Zapatistas and Rojava come to mind - inflict upon themselves the language and the strategies of states.  Rojava's expansion to form a contiguous polity, the zapatista's (EZLN's) monopoly on force speak to the power of states and their ability to apply violence.

The pro-colonialists or apologists of colonialism therefore need not point to railways or industrial infrastructure as a sign of their beneficence, but rather to the fact that decolonial movements have aped the logics of the very Empires which had spawned them.

But this nation, that which defines itself as atemporal, as distinct from all other nations, this nation can be nothing other than a dead end.

The nation must project onto itself an aura of inevitability, such that all histories of the peoples that have lived within its borders must have led to the creation of the state.  Even settler-colonial nations must use this rhetoric.

Australia calls its indigenous peoples Indigenous Australians, forging a direct link from pre-colonial times to the modern nationstate.  

This is nonsense.  The indigenous peoples, who themselves possessed multiple languages, multiple traditions, were massacred by colonial forces.  Indigenous Australians have essentially been Australian-ised, their histories contorted to fulfil a narrative of contiguity with the colonial Australia.  

Indeed, colonialisation served as a civilisational rupture for the nations of indigenous peoples across the world, marked by displacement and destruction.  The nation state, however, must claim them as the first amongst its ranks - however this has always been retroactive.  First they are indigenous, then they have been Australianised.

In this sense, Australia is truly Terra Nullius - Australia was devoid of peoples save for the Australians.

Of course, these myths and these historiographies are new ones - during periods of brazen extermination, Terra Nullius meant something different altogether.  The exact stories of the nation will shift as different parties and powers ascend, but that sense of inevitability and congruity must be kept.

This sense of congruity, however, has an underside.

What happens when the very essence of a nation's being is built upon trauma, and threats both real and imaginary?

It should be noted that the first white Australian settlers by and large were convicts.  These were destitute people, locked up on brigs for paltry crimes, and sent to an unfamiliar land.  These settlers were faced, understandably, by justified acts of aggression from the indigenous peoples.  

Think about this.

You were torn from your home, sent to an unfamiliar land, separated from family, and under assault from the native populations.

This is a recipe for trauma.  It should be no surprise then that the so called civilised peoples of the earth, when confronting the peoples whose lands they stole committed genocides.  It should be no surprise to us that this genocidal boomerang, upon being cast out by the civilised peoples of this earth, struck its user.

And as forces rail against refugees and immigrants, of the need to preserve an "Australian" identity, what else could these be but the offshoots of those traumas, the return of that genocidal boomerang?

These narratives of trauma are thus woven into our immortal nations.  With every institution and every act, this spectre looms over us.  This is a permanent siege mentality - that we all live in a world defined by a wave of hostiles, of pure evils, and of mutual incomprehensibility.

But this is does not illuminate our path forwards.  This is a dead end.  These are thought forms we are trapped by, and with each act of aggression, each boat stopped, each cafe held hostage, we remain in this immortal, inevitable trauma.

It should therefore not surprise us that the first successful international movement was not that of socialism, which sought to surpass these traumas, in a sense, to recover from these blows upon our being, but rather that of fascism.  

Fascism, which arose from these traumas, fascism that sought to revisit these traumas upon others engulfed the so called civilised world.  Even nations that wished to emulate Europe were ensnared - Japan, snubbed by civilised racism, sought out to establish its own empire, and in doing so, embraced civilised racism and fascism.

These legacies of trauma, ingrained upon us by the nationstate, seen as inevitable and inextricable from our way of life, is one where we are doomed to act out these plays of trauma.

It is one where the victim and the victimiser become blurred, where the colonised and the coloniser become bastardised, whereby the only way we see fit to eviscerate these traumas from ourselves is to eviscerate others.

Power against the strength of the gun therefore comes from the barrel of a gun.  

And so, in our polycrisis - the climate crisis, the wars that plague our world, the migrant crisis - we have been propelled to recreate the modes of action that have mirrored our traumas.

We think of ourselves as powerless against the creeping destruction of the world as we know it, and so we yearn to destroy some other to regain even a modicum of power. 

The state seeks to be immortal, to do so, it must be inevitable and permanent, and thus all blows against it are cemented forever in history.

We must recover from these traumas.  The alternative is to confront the power which arose from the barrel of a gun - the alternative is to be forever pursued by that spectre of fascism.