22 July 2023
Virtual reality war games: speech to PPN webinar
I am speaking to you as a guest in Larrakia Country in the Top End of Australia and as a guest, I acknowledge the Larrakia people as traditional custodians and I respect their continuing culture.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Country has been violently seized through English invasion 250 years ago and has never been ceded by its many first nation peoples.
I affirm that genuine independence of Australia cannot be achieved without a just and sovereign Treaty with the indigenous custodians of this land.
I respect the right of Australian indigenous peoples to a constitutionally enshrined Voice that allows them to speak together and inform non-indigenous Australians of how joint sovereignty can be achieved through peaceful means.
We need to reflect and act upon how to change a war-making world and to transform it by recognising our own violence and deconstructing it.
Commanders of the leading Talisman Sabre and Pitch Black games are reconstructing war by using legendary Swords in Rocks and equally gripping myths of the Boogeyman or Nightmare King as a way to encourage virtual realities of war.
Just look at the hype for Talisman Sabre 2023: Billed as the greatest show on earth or ‘the 10th and largest iteration’ of the Talisman Sabre adventures. It will apparently reflect interoperability between over 30,000 allied troops. They’ll be fighting against evil ‘Olvanians’.
Compare this with the Talisman Game: fighting mythical characters, trying to reach the Crown of Command and giving contestants the chance to kill off all competition. Then getting a chance to be a new legend. Spot the difference if you dare!
I question the way white invaders look at peace and education to fit into a neo-liberal dominant world order. To ‘do’ peace, we have to challenge the violence structured into imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal social and economic systems.
T23 may be a mock invasion but it’s offensive – not defensive. Every year in the Dry season in the Top End of the Northern Territory, wargames are played in what the US generals call an enormous ‘theatre of war’. Australia – this year – will become a giant US military base for 2 weeks.
In the theatre of war, the drive towards greater military complexity is pushed by those with vested institutional interests in such a process. It’s all designed to preserve the military-industrial structure. More sophisticated weapons demand more and more intensive training to use these weapons. To not waste this training, the wargames must go on. Peace is not an option.
We are being led by the nose in a US-made rules-based order. This is further defined as:
- The US rules the world;
- the US makes all rules;
- no one knows what the rules are, only that they exist;
- the US will be in charge of the flexibility provided by the rules’ non-existent nature;
- successful alternative rules of governance (as in China, Singapore) must always be derided as authoritarianism;
- unfair global dominance by 13 percent of the world’s (mostly Western) people must always be referred to as democratic.
This year we in the Top End will be subjected to these games of war at great cost – to our environment, cultural/social lives and our local economy. There will be the legendary spirit of the sacred Talisman Sabre along with joint Star War force posturing and next year it will be Pitch Black games as the Boogeyman or Nightmare King takes us into the dark corners of the NT. We will be subjected to mock displays by military and political elites ‘bringing peace’ and thanking hostage communities for kindly ‘hosting’ their intergalactic stormtroopers. They will have open displays of their very expensive, noisy and pollutive war toys and wow us all with public fly-overs in their billion-dollar warplanes.
They will fight us for our seas, skies, land, towns and transport routes. Interestingly, we will feel, smell and hear the massive pollution they bring but there will be no accounting or transparency in our national auditing for climate changing Greenhouse gas emissions. Their pretence of being here for humanitarian reasons will leave us with no escape. The massive bill for their highly pollutive wargames will not be recorded – by our governments or theirs. Global warming is the most certain and immediate of any of the threats that the US and its allies face in the next several decades. In fact, global warming has begun: drought, fire, flooding and temperature extremes will lead to displacement and death. Climate refugees are on the move but to where?
The US-led invasion will continue throughout the Dry season: our strongest tourist and fire season. The US Force Posture and yearly war exercises will add considerably to our Greenhouse Gas emissions. In fact, US-led mock wars around the world are greater than the greenhouse gas emissions of entire industrialised countries, such as Sweden, Denmark and Portugal. Guess who pays for this?
Then – it’s off to another wargame in another allied and captive theatre of war – to return here the following Dry season to off-set some of the more than 3,685 million Metric Tons of CO2 the US Dept Of Defence greenhouse gas emissions have accumulated since 1975.
The wargames industry in the Top End is just another reckless and feckless tourist venture. The landlubbers love our wide, open spaces, the airfarers love our wide, open skies and the seafarers love our warm, blue seas and white sandy ‘undeveloped’ beaches. A weapons ordnance specialist from Delamere Air Weapons Range lyrically says, ‘With steadily increasing numbers of ADF and foreign forces participating in the (Pitch Black) exercise, all staff and visitors can be comfortably accommodated in modern facilities, utilise several different recreation areas, and enjoy a large mess that never fails to turn out quality meals’.
There’s no room for peace in defence-embedded media reports or theatre notes. Military forces aren’t trained in peace; they bomb the life out of the Delamere environment in scenarios set up to ‘represent real-life’. Then.. it’s off to the excellent meals in the mess.
These are indeed extraordinary times and they call for a fresh look at the concepts and assumptions of peace work. A fresh look at how we do peace work to deconstruct the structural violence of a militarised society and economy is to first of all look at militarism.
Wars around the world are too often led by the United States of America. These wars and the results are forgotten even when cities, towns and villages are devastated and millions of people massacred as they go about daily lives. Many more millions of people are now refugees in countries where our governments invest in weapons to kill more people and decimate the environment. What motivates our leaders to send weapons of war rather than peace delegations?
Military values, ideology and a pattern of violent behaviour start to dominate the political, social, economic and external affairs of the state. This then leads to militarised structural, ideological and behavioural patterns in society and government.
Although militarism varies from culture to culture and from time to time, there are common elements. Material forms include wars, foreign and colonial occupation, military rule and human rights’ abuses. Institutional forms include expanded armed forces and a disproportionate amount of money budgeted for the military. Militarisation gradually expands the theatre of war into the civilian arena. Industrial plants become dependent on military contracts and the state relies on the military to solve its unemployment problems.
On May 1, Defence Minister Richard Marles appeared on the ABC’s Insiders program. He said: “the threat is not that we are about to be invaded, but our exposure to economic coercion and to coercion from an adversary is greater and the potential for that coercion going forwards is much more significant, and that’s where the threat lies, and that’s why we need to re-posture for that.”
The Joint Force Air Mobility Command Commander, Gen Mike Minihan said recently, ‘We fully understand the magnitude of responsibility that rests on our shoulders, and we will deliver what is required to serve our fellow Allies and partners and preserve our nation’s sacred peace, prosperity and prestige.’
In other words, there is no military threat from China – or any other non-Western nation – but it’s essential for the US-led war industry to appear professional to all allied forces and industries. We just can’t be seen to increase our vulnerable dependent economic situation with China.
As I sit here in my open and naturally-ventilated tropical abode, I can often hear the allied warplanes rallying from the south to destroy the diverse birdsong and natural peace of why I need to live and die here. I’m more than aware that my need to protect the wider health and well-being of the world environment is vital – and critically fierce.
As a peace educator, I imagine Country as a naturally peaceful experience of past, present and future fitting together. A mere reproduction of a capitalist, market-dominated present just won’t bear peace in the future. We need community-driven acts of cooperation and self-determination to free us from consumerism and militarism and to prevent us becoming a rapidly expanding mass of wasted humans.
As a critical thinker, I try to offer ways towards a future that goes beyond our current oppressive ways of thinking and acting.[1]
It feels like the US has been at war with the world forever. It operates from bases in more than 80 countries. It has an armed force of more than two million people, 11 nuclear aircraft carriers, and the world’s most advanced military aircraft and is more than capable of projecting power anywhere on the planet. With ‘Space Command’ it is set to invade outer space.[2]
All in all, US, UK and Australian ‘shared interests’ are based on Disneyland stories of the shared non-indigenous ‘legendary past’. Cowboy settlers are god-like heroes and Indians/Aboriginals are devilish enemies. It all depends on our perspective.
In reality, soldiers – like heroes – are not born, they’re made. To make a soldier we share, celebrate and reinforce some of the most aggressive, and most insecure, elements of masculinity: those that promote violence, misogyny, homophobia and racism.
The US Marine rotation force in Darwin visits primary schools and speaks about what being a soldier means. These soldiers are ready to advance shared goals to bring peace and security to all children. Peace and gender training in Rwanda includes understanding gender and sex; gender socialization; patriarchy and masculinity; gender power relations and male privilege; gender-based violence and human rights and diversity. This is a framework for building positive masculinity and a more peaceful world.
As descendants of non-indigenous invaders, will we ever face up to the brutal past we’ve profited from? Can we even envisage a sustainably managed and populated continent where several hundred groups of culturally-diverse peoples lived communal lifestyles in harmony with the environment and other life forces for 60,000 years?
What would a world beyond individual ownership and violent upheaval of peoples and other lifeforms look like? We’re heading for a climate catastrophe with extremely powerful storms, famine, and less access to freshwater already making huge areas of the world unstable. We really can’t afford to go on feeding political tensions and fuelling mass migrations and refugee crises by buying into weapons and war machines.
It just doesn’t make any sense to support US-led wars against the world when we should be supporting peace. Peace education builds personal and social development rooted in a commitment to ‘peace’: not only the absence of violence but also the presence of relationships that work well.
As the wargames proceed, soldiers line up to pull sacred swords (talisman sabres) from rocks or practise to be dark guardians.
A genuinely peaceful community fosters belonging, makes it easier for people to participate, encourages self-determination, challenges patterns of fearful difference and exclusion and values dissent as potentially productive.
How about we all share knowledge now of how to work together to make peace into the future?
Diana Rickard
[1] Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the promise of critical pedagogy