JOHN KINSELLA: Poet, Vegan Anarchist-Pacifist

Interview by Claudette Vaughan

John Kinsella is a well known Australian poet, vegan anarchist-pacifist. He speaks with the Abolitionist-Online about his life, loves and so-called feral animals.

Abolitionist: It's well documented that you have described yourself as a vegan anarchist-pacifist. Can you go into more detail about that here?

John Kinsella: Very simply and succinctly, “a pacifist” speaks for itself. I am against any form of violence. I've written extensively on how one can define pacifism. It's a very tenuous term because if someone pushes you and you push back that defies your pacifism or if you defend your child in a vulnerable situation is that in defiance of your pacifism? There are subtleties and variations. Basically it's about not using any form of aggression to respond to someone aggressing towards you or using some kind of a violent method to get what they want. I try and live by that.

Certainly when I was younger I lived a pretty wild life and I was a pretty aggressive kind of person. I have tried over the years to reduce the ironies of aggression. There's a lot of subtle ways of being aggressive. The anarchism speaks for itself as well. I'm against the State. I'm for small collective modes of living. I'm very dedicated to the rights of the individual but with collective responsibility as well. I think the kind of American variations of anarchism that concentrate entirely on the individual often deny the rights of the collective, of the group, and I think one has a responsibility in one's individualism to respect other peoples' rights and needs and so on. It's a kind of individual-collective anarchism that I believe in.

I am also pragmatic in that I think you can be an anarchist and live within the so-called State system. There are a lot of small ways you can demonstrate your resistance to the State and they actually do help to change the State, obviously not violently – I am totally against any sort of violent change. I think revolutions tend to be violent so I'm not revolutionary in that sense. In an “ideas” sense I very strongly believe in good example and living in certain ways as a vegan and as an anarchist it might encourage others to look at that particular way of approaching problems. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it does. I'm very pragmatic in my orientation. I actually have an expression for it. I call it “umbrella anarchism”. This is an anarchism that fits into an environment, that tries to nurture and encourage different organic approaches to things, right from growing organic vegetables and things through to how you deal with large community problems and concerns. I don't follow any political party for example. I find them all odious. But on the other hand I'm very outspoken and have worked with many politicians as well.

Just because I loathe them doesn't mean I'm not prepared to work for them for a specific issue. I just don't believe in voting for a Nation State which I see as the root of all evil, basically. That's where violence comes from.

Abolitionist: As a vegan anarchist-pacifist what are your views on animal rights? Do you speak as the pacifist, within the system, or the anarchist, outside the system?

John Kinsella: For me, animal rights is a totally logical extension for an anarchist; it's beyond my comprehension how people can call themselves “anarchists” and do everything they can to defend the right of the individual human, have freedom of choice and not live under decision-making structures, and not respect the right of all living things. The laws I live under are not so much the laws of the State but the laws of natural justice. I believe there are rights and wrongs. One doesn't live lawlessly. In fact, quite the opposite. As a vegan anarchist-pacifist you live with a lot of laws that you impose upon yourself, on how you live, and how you behave, and your ideas on justice and those kinds of things. But for me they are universal truths. They don't just apply to people but to all living things. For example, people say to me, “Why do you eat plants and not eat any animal products?” I can't not eat plants. They say there's only one people on the planet who has entirely lived without ingesting planet matter and even those people actually ate the contents in the stomachs of the animals they killed so they were still indirectly eating plant matter anyway. Animal rights are an extension of that thought. The laws I live by apply to them equally. It's entirely illogical to me to in any way to eat or use or abuse animals. Why would I? I don't do it to people. They are all on the same level for me.

Abolitionist: What in a anarchist pacifist vegan world constitutes pathological pursuits, then?

John Kinsella: Basically anything that self-serves. Individualism and self-serving aren't the same thing. Individualism is the freedom of expression and to live in a way that doesn't harm or hurt others. A pathological pursuit would be to serve the self to the detriment of everything else. You can get arguments that say everything one does gains or denies someone else or another living thing. These arguments can be taken to the level of absurdity but in a practical, pragmatic, straightforward day-to-day living way it's perfectly logical to me to do as little as I can to hurt somebody else and live my life at the same time. Once you start trying to bend that to self-serve, then it becomes pathological. Once again, all these things are strata and degrees. The most absurd argument I have ever been presented with as a pacifist and as a vegan is – and it's always the same everywhere around the world in multiple languages – if a tiger was about to eat your child and if you had to hurt it to stop it, would you do so? For me that's a no-brainer. You would respond instantly to protect your child. Any living thing would. I wouldn't go out of my way to hurt the tiger. You do what you have to do, but you don't do more. I would certainly try and prevent it happening and I certainly would try and protect the rights of the tiger as well. People don't seem to be able to grasp that more holistic argument. What interests me about fellow vegans and fellow animal-rights people is that's usually where they start; the ability to understand that very simple argument; but it still confuses me what's so difficult to understand about that one.

Abolitionist: It's seems as if the understanding stays in the abstract because the question itself is abstract and they're trying to trip you up on it…

John Kinsella: Oh yeah. It's like the Hitler-was-a-vegetarian one, and of course he actually wasn't vegetarian. He ate small birds. But the idea that the act of not eating something makes you more pure or less pure has never been part of the argument. For me that's where you begin, and you can have good people and bad people and in-between people and all the rest of the people within the world of vegans. You know I've known plenty of vegans who are pretty unpleasant people and there's plenty of vegans saying I'm a pretty unpleasant person, but it's not this argument of purity. For me it's a practical thing. You do not do it because a) it's not necessary and b) you're directly and actually inflicting hurt and harm. And then you get this ridiculous argument about how much things feel. I mean that's irrelevant: according to whose criteria, you know? One's own or the other creatures. It's kind of a strange vague ability for people to know if something feels or doesn't feel and how it feels. It's the arrogance, I suppose, that really upsets me. What I try and do is resist and resist that particular kind of arrogance.

Abolitionist: You once said one of the reasons you are a vegan anarchist-pacifist is because “it is a refutation of the alibis of moderation and deference to popular opinion”. Are you making a stand against the already existing culture that's out there?

John Kinsella: I'm not what you call a “culturalist”. There are a lot of bigotries hidden under cultural debates and the idea that if we look at western culture, per se, it's this large entity that's amorphous, and it actually absorbs many different cultures, and part of that one is trying to define oneself against, and so on. I find that problematic because culture is usually a term applied from the outside of controlling and containing something. So people talk about indigenous cultures, as a way of compartmentalizing and reducing them and putting them somewhere where they won't bother them. Whereas, in fact, any so called “culture” generates its own terminology from language, describing itself and talking about itself in relationships to other things. So this idea of any level of participation and resistance to culture I find slightly problematic because a) it's indefinable and b) when it is defined it's done to control us. My answer would be yes but with some reservations about terminology simply because — as we know, for example, with speciesist language — it's all done to reduce, compartmentalize and control. People say these things and use these expressions not because they weren't thinking about them, but because the thinking's already been done for them and it has been spasmodically absorbed into the process. The word I use when I am teaching, and it's a clichéd word but it's a really relevant one, is “respect”. I think we must have a kind of mutual respect, although relatives of mine are say farmers and people who do things that I am so opposed to in every way. Mind you, I have come indirectly out of that myself. When I was a kid I was literally armed to the teeth — or wanted to be, at least. I collected weapons. I had reached the point where I had killed so many animals from fish through to foxes that I thought: this is just illogical and sick, and I don't have to do this anymore, and I stopped. Cut and dried, stopped. That was it. And I went the other way. Some of the people I grew up with still do this. Now, I have close relationships with them and I love them dearly. We deeply disagree; however, having said that, I have never ever closed the door, and they don't either, for communication. My dream is to live in this other way, that change might come but I'm just a bit cautious about how one talks about it… language is really important and in the end it's an issue of respect. If I respect them and they respect me, then the animals in the end might actually benefit. All I'm interested in is the benefit of the animals. I'm not interested in how I get there. I'm quite prepared to talk to people I deeply disagree with simply to get that practical end result.

Abolitionist: You have spoken before about your interest in creating a theoretical language for peace. How would you create a theoretical language of veganism to challenge current discourses of thought?

John Kinsella: I think that's what I do in my poetry. Reviewers often comment on that incredible obsession with death and cruelty in my work. In fact at times it really repels people because there's so much of it. I'm afraid that's the language we live with. People pretend it's not there, so when they sit down and eat their placebo meal that may not even have meat visually in it, but it's present in the by-products and some kind of fortifying process has taken place, linguistically to bring an awareness… even the easygoing and polite language of faux foods is actually just a way of hiding and dressing up the reality of death and slaughter. For me, it's a kind of poetic mission to actually show how language is working. Some vegans use the tactic of never using that kind of language. That's their way of getting rid of it; I respect that, but my way is the opposite. My way is to use all of that and I put it there in front of people's faces, yet I don't make a judgment or try and tell people what to think; but the language is there. Believe you me, language is powerful enough just to do its own job. The word “peace” is just peace with people, peace with animals and peace with all living things. I actually use the language of destruction to create a language of peace. I don't just try and delete all the nasty things from it. I actually over-emphasize them. Some people use these tactics that I don't agree with, but people use visual images of slaughter to try and stop people from abusing animals. That's a different thing to me. That's directly exploiting the animal as well as far as I'm concerned. I think language is that degree removed where you can actually confront people by saying things and by writing about the foxhunt or writing about a slaughterhouse. At the moment I am writing on the buying of votes from Pacific nations — Japan 's trying to overturn the whaling ban. I'm writing using the language of whale slaughter. Horrendous stuff, but that's how I create a language of peace. It's by using the language of destruction and reversing it, and reverting it.

Abolitionist: By shedding light into dark places is where we all have to go eventually.

John Kinsella: A lot of people don't want to go there. They do everything they can to avoid it.

Abolitionist: Yeah, that was my point in facing the destruction of what the dominant culture has created.

John Kinsella: The world has been closed off rather than “opened”… especially through the climate of the web and so on, our degrees of separation have grown and grown and grown. The web hasn't made us closer, as many suggest. There's really this faux placebo separated kind of world where people really are living a kind of virtual mentality. The reality is not, of course. It's a tactile world as it ever was, in some ways disturbingly more, but they actually think they are living separated from reality and it's the thinking that they are living separately which allows all this stuff to just roll on by.

One doesn't face the consequences at all. The global warming “thing” – when suddenly people who have been speaking for 20 to 30 years on this are finally “heard”, whole it's been ignored and denied, and suddenly it suits the nuclear debate, suddenly they have discovered there's global warming, because it might be useful to their economic gain. My big thing at the moment, and I hope everyone's big thing, in this country, is to really really dedicate myself to trying to resist, obviously from my point of view and I hope everyone's in a pacifist way, but to resist verbal and in every other non-destructive way, the nuclearisation of this country. That from a vegan perspective would be damaging, and from every practical and ethical point of view. And now's there's a sudden kind of desire to use the language of global warming when it's being resisted and so on – those kind of duplicities and those kinds of contradictions and those ironies are things we can linguistically challenge. Language for me is what empowers these people. You can actually wrest the language back from them and you can resist them. It's far more effective than any aggression, I think.

Abolitionist: John, please discuss spiritually and veganism in light of your own experiences.

John Kinsella: I don't subscribe to any specific belief system and I don't oppose any specific belief system, although I am a strong believer in the relevance in being spiritual. I think the basic principle of thinking that oneself is not the be-all and end-all is a really healthy thing. Whether that's believing there's a grand creator or creative force or whether that's respecting a tree nearby or whatever — all are on the same plane to me; I'm not differentiating between a grand deity and a local deity either. The belief outside the physical self is a really, really healthy thing. I don't believe in anything per se, but that doesn't matter I don't think. I don't really think I need to believe in anything per se either. I believe in the relevance of this thing called “spirituality”. I get very worried for example when debates about animal rights get sort of hijacked into debates about religious beliefs because I have known people from pretty much every religious derivation who have been vegans. Obviously Buddhist vegans, I've known Hindu vegans, I've met many Jewish vegans, Muslim vegans, Zoroastrian vegans and so on. All religions have desire and flexibility to have anarchist-pacifist belief systems so there's no contradiction there for me. It's how people “manipulate” and “bend” them to their own needs. The spiritual is that extra dimension that allows you to step outside yourself and maybe consider how someone else is feeling or reflect upon the insignificance of oneself. So you can have individual rights and be an individualist and at the same time actually see yourself as being less relevant than something else. I came out of a background of being brought up in quite a religious environment. Not a too-religious environment, but I was confirmed in the Church of England. I actually thought I had a vocation at one stage – we could go places with that; but I heard a sermon at church when I was fifteen, the last time I ever went to church, on cash registers at Christmas and how Christmas was like a cash register. We all cashed in. I got up and walked out and thought you know, I don't need this. This is propaganda. Then at the same time I respect other people's desire, that an analogy drawn like that may do something for them. Spirituality for me is highly personal, but it's also a very logical thing. It's not something I have any problems with on any level.

Abolitionist: Years ago you said that the failure of the animal rights movement was in worshipping superstar status and this would be the downfall of the movement.

John Kinsella: Yeah, I think it's a wank. I really do. I think PeTA is an absolute contradiction in terms – the idea that people will suddenly become interested because they're interested in someone's star status, that has nothing to do with animal rights or veganism, or whatever the related issue might be, nothing to do with it at all, but they suddenly feel an empathy and a sympathy because of that person and the attitude “if they can do it, I can do it” – I've just seen no evidence that this has been the case. What you get is faddism. You get people who become interested as a faddish kind of thing, and then as quickly become uninterested when it moves on. A lot of these “stars” disappoint people too; it turns out they are not real vegans, or they wear fur or whatever it is; there will always be some contradiction, even by the declaration of the stars themselves. What happens is, the contradiction then gets played up and people turn around and say, “There you go”. But it's irrelevant. The person who's been a farmer for 50 years who suddenly, and I've met 2 or 3 of these people, becomes a vegetarian, then maybe even a vegan, now they are the people who are interesting; who have had a life experience and suddenly turned around. I just think the cult of personality is incredibly damaging to the cause. Also the faddist thing of making it seem almost like a game. You meet a lot of, for example, 20-year-old anarchists until they are 22, and they have gone and smashed a few things and spray painted a few walls and anarchist signs. It's just a meaningless gesture. It's meaningless frustration and aggression if there is no kind of intent behind what you do, whatever age you are, whether you are eight or eighty. If you don't have an intent as a kind of analytical process going on, then for me, it ultimately leads nowhere. As my partner says, “ If one animal is saved, then that's good”. And I agree with that. If they are vegan for one day, that's a good thing. Any degree is good for me, but if you are an organisation trying to forward animal rights using those methodologies, I think they are very limited. One irony that really struck me years ago was when vegetarian groups used to sell Annie Lennox as a vegetarian and then a headline appeared in the newspaper, “Annie Lennox is eating Peking Duck in restaurant.” Okay, what was that supposed to mean? That's what she did. That's for her individual conscience. What does that actually mean about vegetarianism? Absolutely nothing at all. It means a duck got killed and eaten. That's the brute fact of the matter. That doesn't make vegetarianism either weak or bad because it had little to do with it in the first place. It just means that she contradicted herself or she went and changed her mind or whatever she did. Why was she highlighted in the first place?

Abolitionist: Yeah, it's an interesting study on why people worship others and why people love to be worshipped…

John Kinsella: Exactly, and also they are not aware that they will inevitably, by the nature of celebrity, be let down. And it's the letting-down that does the damage, and it will happen. I strongly feel that PeTA have made very bad mistakes. Don't get me wrong. I think there are a lot of dedicated people there, but I think their tactics are really damaging to the animal rights movement. For me, these things we're talking about are sustained over a lifetime, and it's not like something you do this week because that's the mood you're in, and you're all hyped up. Like these people who do an action one weekend, and then they can't be bothered doing it again the next weekend, because they have something else to do. If you believe in something, it's your life's commitment.

I fly in a lot of aeroplanes, and they pump a lot of crap into the atmosphere, and indirectly I am as responsible or culpable as anyone for the damage being done to the planet. I fly to move to places to talk about these issues. The moment you cease to think you are culpable then you are also not doing anything. I guess what we try and do in our lives is reduce the ironies, reduce the contradictions. I think the faddist will do it one week and then forget about it from then on. Often it doesn't help a lot.

Abolitionist: I've just been to a conference on trying to get abandoned animals out of pounds. I don't think it was successful and was really shocked with their attitude towards the feral cat. These people define themselves as animal advocates. I mean, is the feral cat the new pitbull?

John Kinsella: Disgusting, isn't it? I am a defender of all feral animals and a defender of all animals, so that's where we start. There's this situation at the moment and it really illustrates the stupidity of people. The property we live on while we are in Australia is incredibly beautiful. There are still trees on there that were there many many years ago. There's a bit of bush there and so on. We have a lot of birds and we have kangaroos foraging. Anyway, lately this feral cat has moved in. So what I do is I go down and say “Come on, cat. Move away. Leave the birds alone'. That cat just stares at me and purrs — and, I mean, this is a wild, feral cat. It's to the point now where the feral cat when he sees me rolls on his back and twitches his tail and looks at me. I say, “Well cat, this is it really. You're here and I'm here. I'm as destructive an entity as you are. My people have culled and destroyed this land and killed almost every wild animal so I am in no position to judge you.” So this cat and I have developed this strange rapport where I say, “Cat, can you go and please leave the birds alone” and if I see him trying to catch a bird I'll shoo him away and that kind of thing. Weird to many, I've no doubt. But that's the dynamic! It makes me feel good to see the bird fly away but I understand also that the cat has to eat and does kill, and eats the birds and the mice and all the rest of it. He is part of the “environment” there and it has to be respected as much as well. One can do little things to help the “native wildlife”, like you can fence areas where a bird frequents a nest. The most practical thing I can do – and also there are ways of arranging it so certain things can get in and out and so on. So it's using one's brain. At least that seems to be a safe haven for other animals, and the cat won't eat them when he's on the prowl, but that's what cats do, I'm afraid, and that's not for me to judge. For me it's all very pragmatic and practical — there's no way in a trillion years that I would ever to anything to harm a feral cat or any other animal.

Abolitionist: You have made connections between “blaming” the feral cat, and the language around the treatment of refugees in Australia . Can you articulate that again for us here?

John Kinsella: Of course there's no direct correlation to be made. I would never be so careless or reductive to make such comparisons. However, there's an interesting extension of psychology in the way that anything that comes from outside one's familiar environment is immediately considered to be alien when, in fact, quite often the very people in those environments are alien to it at some point or another themselves. I've always felt very strongly that if there is a sin of cats being in Australia , it's because humans brought them here. The responsibility is with the humans and not the cats. To use a cliché, the cats cannot help it. It amazes me to see people breed cats, bring them into the country, release them to wander and then complain about wild cats destroying native wildlife. They keep cats for their own entertainment, largely, and rarely for the sake of the animal itself. Cats are here and they have been here for a long, long time. All living things are worthy, as far as I'm concerned, of equal respect. Just because some things are a species of rare birds and another thing is the so-called common cat and someone's a human, for me, none are any worse than any other but we are living equals. So I feel very strongly about this vindictiveness, and this desire to make another animal take the burden of guilt for the damage that's been done by humans to a landscape is just not acceptable.

What I very strongly support are the type of refuges and protected areas and keeping cats physically out of them if possible. Practical approaches. I don't mean keeping them out by trapping and killing them either. I mean by physically removing them and putting them elsewhere. In many ways, one doesn't like to interfere with anything, but given that there is a serious issue, there are options that can be exercised. One can preserve native wildlife AND respect and not harm cats!

Around where we live there are wild cats. Only recently have they started to appear because of the “outbreak” in the number of field mice after the wet summer we had. Now we have a drought. So it's not surprising wild cats have appeared, and so have foxes, around the place, and they come and they predate on the field mice. That is the case, as it may be. It is not for me to make judgments on these things. I try and secure areas of the block for the birdlife to remain functional and do its thing without being a new threat but for me it ultimately comes down to people being responsible. They talk about the cats and the devastation of the wildlife. Well, that may well be true but at the same time they are clearing the last remaining “remnant” bush. People are physically destroying the land and you've got this total hypocrisy happening. There are a number of gun clubs in Western Australia that specialize in shooting cats, and they meet up around Geraldton and they invite various sub-clubs where they all meet and they all go out for a big cat-killing weekend. They have diabolical names like “Coastal Killers”. Then they have a big joke, drink beer and go out and kill anything they can find, then get in the local paper without any critique of what they have doing. People think they're great because they're killing cats. I don't know these specific guys but I've met many of them in the rural world. In my youth I've been with people who have gone out and done this. These people are in it for the blood. They get a high out of it. They talk about sex a lot and the link between violence and sex and the solving of the “feral problem” is all warped and welded together. Many animal rights activists and commentators have observed and noted this connection.

So for me, it's not a matter that they are going out to protect the poor wildlife, because for the rest of the time they are shooting kangaroos and anything else they can shoot and getting away with. So it's total hypocrisy. I just feel very strongly that people have an obligation to look at the truth behind these things.

I also profoundly disagree with the view that because an animal is a meat-eating animal it is in any way wrong. That's garbage to me. If a meat-eating animal pursues its own food and humans aren't involved in that process that's largely its business and I don't judge nature. I just don't. Capital “N” or small “n” nature or anything else you want to imagine it to be. I just find it an incredible arrogance to suggest that one should. On the other hand I have major problems with people keeping animals and feeding other animals to those animals. I don't keep animals for that reason. I have a great love of these animals and I enjoy being around them, to tell the truth, so there's a certain amount of hypocrisy in that. I enjoy being around them when it is not my responsibility to look after them.

That's just the honest truth. In the past when I have looked after dogs for 6 months at a time, I've put them on a vegan diet, and it can be done, but at the same time I do think it is an incredible non-natural process. Animals are animals and people are people and we don't need to use them. Maybe they need to use us on occasion and increasingly, but that's exactly where the obligation lies. We have an obligation to protect and create an environment where they can function because we have taken nearly every single one they have. It's a complex issue.

With regard to the link to refugees, the reason the link is made is not because it's equating refugees with cats, because some will get very upset with that. It's actually the opposite. It's saying that refugees are treated the same way that cats are treated. They are treated with the same insensitivity, the same abuse and treated incidentally, even within their hierarchy of humans and animals; for me humans and animals are on the same level and it's not an insult, but for some people, humans are well above animals, and it's a huge insult, and to make any comparisons is highly insulting. I'm not making the comparison on that level – I'm making the comparison in the opposite direction. Refugees here are often treated as the feral cats and other kinds of feral animals — they are perceived as a threat to “nation's” environment.

It's a very disturbing area, isn't it, how you make such comparisons? Because from a vegan perspective, to say that you treat someone like a dog is very different from it being said by someone who eats animals. The best-case scenario is it's a good thing to be “treated like a dog” if they should be treated the same as all of us. But of course that's not the way people see these things. I'm very interested in language, as I've said before, in how things are expressed and the motives behind them and so on. My opinion is only my opinion, but how we talk about things is something we are all involved with, so you have to give a set of possible reactions and not just accept that yours is the only one. In essence, we treat not only our “feral” animals (I loathe that word intensely) but all animals with disdain, and so we treat those humans who don't fulfil all those criteria that the nationalists basically see as being characteristic of “respectable” Australians. And that's what it really comes down to. Refugees coming to Australia have as few rights as feral cats do. It's an obscenity whichever way you look at it. I feel it is my responsibility to speak out on such issues.