EDITION: CLASS.
In Weathering With You, Makoto Shinkai asks: in the context of climate catastrophe, what happens when choosing life conflicts with preserving the kind of world which sustains life?
In the thick of an October night in 2022, two men climbed a bridge. At Dartford Crossing in England, Marcus Decker and Morgan Trowland ascended sixty metres before unfurling a banner that read ‘Just Stop Oil’. There they remained for forty hours, during which traffic at the crossing, including oil tankers, was brought to a standstill. Eventually cops sent a crane to bring them down. They would spend the next six months in prison on remand awaiting trial, at which they would be sentenced to two years seven months and three years’ jail respectively. Trowland was eventually released after serving fourteen months in custody. Decker was released after sixteen months, and is now battling deportation.
Trowland and Decker were not the first to block a road, port, bridge, or railway as an act of resistance against climate crisis. Nor will they be the last to face the violence of the state in retribution. Most of these people don’t know each other, but when they recount their experiences, themes emerge. It is windier up there than you might have expected. It is cold. There is the physical challenge, the anxiety of saying something silly on the livestream. You are afraid, but you also exist out of time. Getting and spending are not supposed to stop, yet here you are, outside the coordinates of the world. You see the lights of empire spread out before you; it can’t help but be beautiful, but it can’t go on. While the men were dangling from the bridge, people shot fireworks at them.
In Weathering With You, Makoto Shinkai’s romantic, beautiful and true anime allegory of climate crisis, two teenagers are offered a chance to save the world and don’t take it. Hina is a ‘sunshine girl’, a designated human offering who can bring clear weather back to a supernaturally rain-drenched Tokyo, at cost of herself turning into water and vanishing into the sky. Hodaka, who adores her, refuses to acquiesce and journeys into the clouds to bring her back. He succeeds, Hina’s sacrifice is reversed, and Tokyo lapses beneath the sea. At the film’s close, the lovers stand beneath a rare moment of sunshine, vowing that whatever the future holds, they will be alright.
In visual terms, Weathering With You is a remarkable film. Shinkai’s combines his trademark, evocative vocabulary of urban and natural images – a gorgeously realised convenience store, a shaft of sun above the water – with a subtle accretion of details to show a city falling apart. Vines twine into buildings, pipes leak and burst. The mundane co-exists with the supernatural, engendering a world that feels both lived-in and fantastical. As a squall of vaporous fish moves through the air, a newsreader observes the price of lettuce has just tripled.
Yet for all its sweeping imagery, the work also has a private, novelistic feel. Each image is imbued with point of view, either that of its creator or its protagonist: Hodaka is in love with Hina, so everything he sees is drenched in romance. The authorial perspective is less legible. How do we interpret a happy ending which entails the displacement of all the main characters, the loss of settings evoked with such detailed, loving care? “I’ve chosen this world, I’ve chosen to live here!” Hodaka declares in the film’s final scene. Is Shinkai suggesting that in the context of climate catastrophe, choosing life – to be with loved ones; to keep them and ourselves safe, joyful and close – is in conflict with preserving the kind of world which sustains life?
Different strategic motivations may co-exist within the same act of resistance for the environment. Climate defenders may directly inhibit environmentally ruinous sites – a coal port, a defence base, a mine – increasing the costs associated with such projects. They may disrupt the circulation of people, finance, goods, and resources; and with them, the destruction inherent in the cycle of profit and loss. They send a message, casting judgement over colonial-capitalist-consumerism more broadly: This has to stop. And the defenders’ willingness to put themselves at risk underscores the depth of their commitment and the importance of what they have to say.
In the Western world, actions have been characterised by a motif of sacrifice and death, with climate defenders enacting symbolic violence on themselves. When Eddie Whittingham of Just Stop Oil invaded the World Snooker Championships to throw orange powder paint over the table, the image recalled self-immolation – specifically that of Wynn Bruce, a climate activist who set himself on fire on the steps of United States Supreme Court. When Mali Cooper of Blockade Australia blocked the Sydney Harbour Bridge in June of 2022, they chained themself to the steering wheel by fastening a bike lock round their neck.
These choices have not, to say the least, been met with universal acclaim. It’s impossible to gauge popular opinion accurately, mediated as it is through the consent-manufacturing lens of a fossil-captured state and media. But the regularity with which climate defenders are threatened with violence suggests a real undertow of derision, even hate. You can almost see spit flying as a man caught in traffic screams abuse at Mali on the Bridge. Footage from 2019 of Extinction Rebellion protestors atop a London train being dragged down and roughed up by angry commuters has been shared gleefully—and thousands of times.
In a way, this hostility is to be expected. To be interrupted during one’s commute is unpleasant; to be simultaneously confronted with the knowledge we face planetary disaster is a perfect synthesis of disagreeable experiences. This, I suspect, is why climate defenders are often targeted with motivated viciousness, well beyond other inconveniences. Even from ostensible allies, a thread of condescension runs through many responses. It’s common to insist that the defenders are naïve, that they just don’t understand how much they stand to suffer personally when the state lashes back with its repressive toolkit – incarceration, surveillance, administrative punishment, ended careers and wasted time. Typically, no evidence is advanced to support this assertion, other than to point to the frequent youth of the defenders and the intensity of repression, taken as prima facie proof no-one would knowingly accept such risks.
Like everyone else, climate defenders are unevenly informed, but there is no special reason to believe they do not know what they are doing. ‘I don’t regret anything,” said Mali Cooper to a row of smirking TV-heads, hours out of custody after the action on the Bridge. Before their fascist execution at the hands of Georgia State Patrol, the Timoto-Cuica forest defender Tortuguita gave an interview discussing what might happen to the movement if and when someone was killed. ”For every head they cut off, there would be more who would come back to avenge the arrested, to avenge the …”
The allegation of naïveté is really a confession: I wouldn’t do that, therefore no-one would. Such framing works to cast climate defenders outside the bounds of ordinary life: ‘they’ are not like ‘us’. They are seen, not from a vantage point of empathy or identification, but as spectacle. Their feelings are too large and the mode of expression, too dramatic: they are the personification of too much. This assumption may work in the defenders’ favour – Cooper escaped jail after pleading not guilty on grounds of mental health. Yet it also undercuts the severity of our situation. If there are people who take seriously the notion we are living through a planetary catastrophe, the emotional texture of their response will not conform to pre-existing notions of what is reasonable.
Makoto Shinkai is not an emotional minimalist. His first feature, Voices of a Distant Star, tells the story of two teenagers separated in space and time when one is sent on an intergalactic mission. Created using a Power Mac 4, the climactic scene features a mecha-on-alien battle interspersed with falling cherry blossoms, rain, trains gliding wistfully and a young man walking hunched through falling snow – all set to a soaring piano ballad, ‘Through the Years And Far Away’. According to its creator, this work evokes feelings he would experience when he would text his then-girlfriend, who may have taken longer than ideal to text him back. If you are seeking an artistic avatar for too much, here comes your man.
While Shinkai’s protagonists are not always expressive with their faces, the medium of anime allows the whole world to become evocative of their state of mind. People and their surrounding environments are ushered into being through the medium of drawing – they are literally made of the same stuff, rendering the form especially suitable for depicting our interdependency with nature. Anime enjoys its greatest popularity within a Japanese, Asian and South-East Asian milieu, and Shinkai’s work bears the influence of spiritualities endemic to this region. Some of the references are overt, as when Hina floats through a temple gate. Others emerge obliquely, through the films’ exquisite attention to the human and the natural worlds alike: a falling comet, a busy city interchange, a phone. This approach is consistent with the Shinto belief that the actual phenomena of this world have spiritual significance, embodying wonder and awe.
Hayao Miyazaki, the most recognisable anime artist in the West, is also known for his exploration of ecological themes. But Miyazaki tends to take a clear ideological stance – when you see something hideous, you know a moral transgression has occurred. In Princess Mononoke, a shell-wounded boar transforms into a demon; in Spirited Away, excess consumption distorts the kindly No-Face into a grotesque, insatiable monster. By contrast Shinkai’s films don’t tend to feature ugliness at all, whether physical or moral: there are obstacles, but no antagonists. In his most recent and commercially successful works – Your Name, Weathering With You and Suzume no Tojimari – the closest thing to a bad guy is an authoritarian father, whose rigid obedience to rules almost gets people killed. Once our heroes have evaded his grasp, we never hear from him again.
This isn’t to say nothing bad ever happens in the Shinkai extended universe, where beauty is no guarantee of safety. In Suzume, the heroine glides down a hill on her bicycle, the sea sparkling below – we are given to understand this ocean as the one that claimed her mother’s life. In Weathering With You, Hina’s power over sunshine brings joy, but also accelerates the inundation of Japan’s largest city. These films form a thematically-connected trilogy in response to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Concerned with death and trauma, they approach the experience of catastrophe from three successive angles – how to avert disaster, accept one’s failure to avert it, or live in the aftermath.
Unlike an earthquake, the climate crisis has villains, and combining a man-made and a geological catastrophe within the same story leads to some mixed metaphorical baggage. The film’s lack of fingerpointing at any capitalist culprit – one hundred corporations are responsible for 71 percent of emissions! – has caused disquiet for viewers, as has Hodaka and Hina’s failure to make the expected hero’s sacrifice. Some critics have interpreted the story as a defence of passivity and quietism, as if catastrophe is no-one’s fault and there is nothing we can do to change it. On the World Socialist Web Site, Matthew MacEgan went so far as to call Weathering With You a ‘pretty miserable perspective at this moment in history, fatalistic, resigned and unable to confront harsh social reality in the face.’
I think this view rests on a significant misreading of the ending, and on confusion between notions of judgement and responsibility. Towards the end of the film, people harmed by Hodaka’s decision to reverse Hina’s sacrifice try to offer comfort. ‘In old times, Tokyo was just a bay,’ says an old lady displaced from the home she shared with her late husband, suggesting that a cycle of changing environments is nothing new. ‘You changed the world? Bullshit… the world’s always been crazy anyway,’ says Suga, a widower whose young daughter’s illness has been worsened by the rain.
But in the final scene, Hodaka rejects these consolations:
‘It’s no-one’s fault… is that what I should say to her? No, I – we changed the world! I made a choice, I’ve chosen her, I’ve chosen to live here!’
Shinkai isn’t saying ordinary people don’t have the ability to influence events. Rather, the film depicts a world where what is necessary to do is more than most people are willing to give, and with devastating consequences. This isn’t a universe that operates according to a Christian or secular-Christian morality of punishment and reward, but rather a Buddhist-inflected worldview of cause and effect. Hina and Hodaka aren’t bad people because they wanted to live, and this sank Tokyo. It’s just what happened. One’s personal righteousness, or lack thereof, is beside the point. What is asked of you might be unfair, but this has no bearing on the outcome if you fail to do it.
Cause and effect are important for climate defenders, but it isn’t always clear in advance how things are going to work out. A planetary revolution, reshaping our relationship with the natural world, production and each other, has never been accomplished. No-one knows what this would look like. While Hina knew her individual choice to fade into the sky would save Tokyo, the outcomes of climate defenders’ actions are shaped by conditions they can only imperfectly predict; and by choices made by others, over which they have no control.
As the weather evolves, so too does the state’s counter-insurgency strategy, forcing climate defenders to make potentially life-changing decisions without knowing what will happen – either to them personally or to the movement as a whole. Any given foray might lend momentum to a growing struggle against fossil capital and the state, or it might be smashed. The same action, undertaken in a different time or place, could lead to imprisonment, or severe physical harm, or counter-terrorism charges, or no legal punishment at all.
This is not a scenario which lends itself to the conventions of traditional narrative fiction, which demands a clarity of protagonists and stakes. Nor does it conform to the programmatic, smarter-than-thou assumptions undergirding much political discourse. The underlying principle seems to be that whatever climate defenders did, they should have done something else. So if they throw paint they should actually have interrupted circulation, and if they block circulation via roads they should actually have targeted fossil infrastructure. And if they block fossil infrastructure they should have planned a mass action, maybe on roads, but they should also make sure this doesn’t inconvenience anyone. And if they march in a pre-approved route from A to B, inconveniencing nobody, maybe the coal parties and their complicit unions and NGOs can come along – in between imprisoning the people who threw paint, blocked fossil infrastructure or disrupted circulation. And maybe the organisations representing the guards who brutalise Aboriginal people and jail climate defenders – who specifically tear gas Aboriginal prisoners when they riot against potentially lethal climate-exacerbated heat– can come too, you know, for the workers. But hey, it’s climate defenders who aren’t abolitionist enough. You know what I, the kkking of the kkkommunists, would do? I’d have a general strike. I’d just blow up a pipeline. Geniuses all round.
An upside to this orgy of hypocritical non-solidarity is the opportunities for courage and transformation which emerge. Movements which at one point look to have been smashed, resurge in a new moment. When Just Stop Oil threw soup over the glass shield on a Van Gogh painting, they were mocked as unstrategic and (strangely, for a British organisation) insufficiently Indigenous-led. Yet the stunt has since lent an effective symbolic vocabulary to Aboriginal and coloniser activists against Woodside’s gas development at Western Australia’s Burrup Hub. Blockade Australia were, to use the technical term, royally fucked by cops in the weeks before and just after Mali’s action on the Harbour Bridge, yet have returned on successive anniversaries of the raids for new rounds of invigorated blocking. Out of the shit-talk, heroes rise.
Not all climate defenders come from comfortable backgrounds, and even those who do are not immune to the carceral state and its violence. Mali is from flooded Lismore, as is the more recent Blockader Naomi Shine, whose finger was so badly ripped when cops removed her from a lock-on device that she needed emergency surgery. Still, I think it is relevant these performances of symbolic sacrifice are largely undertaken in the wealthy, industrialised West. Relatively privileged people in the Global North see the totalising nature of their own, involuntary implication in systems of oppression. They come to understand that resisting planetary destruction means un-making their entire way of life – a expression of what pan-African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral called ‘class suicide’, which can also be enacted by non-white defenders. Tortuguita had an affluent upbringing, with a stepfather who worked in the oil industry. Resistance by oppressed and colonised people may strike a different tone, and rightly so – as when Indigenous defenders in Peru swarmed oil tankers with canoes, attacked using Molotovs and spears, and held the crews hostage until government was forced to negotiate. Class suicide is one aspiration; class homicide, another.
There are different kinds of courage: physical, legal, interpersonal. Richard Barnard was a participant in one of the Extinction Rebellion train-stopping actions of 2019, variously maligned as ‘tactically stupid’ and a ‘psyop’. Alongside Huda Ammori, Barnard has gone on to co-found the direct action network Palestine Action, which has seen major success in its campaign to attack and close weapons factories raining death on Palestinians. He has done this in the face of both pressure from the state and a wave of popular derision against XR, including from some who one might have hoped would have responded as comrades. Criticisms of XR’s founding branch in Britain circa 2019 – that their ‘apolitical’ approach was deluded, that they were tight with cops – were well-founded in that place and time. Yet they continue to be smeared over that organisation and over environmentalists as a whole, even as offshoots in Australia and elsewhere engage in increasingly abolitionist-inflected resistance, sometimes at great personal cost. While critique in good faith is an act of solidarity, much of what has been thrown is reprehensibly ungenerous. I have often turned to Huey Newton’s words: ‘We should never say a whole movement is dishonest when in fact they are trying to be honest… Friends are allowed to make mistakes.’
It’s hard to imagine how difficult Barnard’s experience must have been, but maybe it doesn’t matter. Richard Barnard is an extraordinary person. So is Mali Cooper, so was Tortuguita. And herein lies a paradox: for a truly mass movement, resistance can’t be the prerogative of a mythologised vanguard, distinct from ordinary people. Yet when they undertake action, climate defenders cease to be ordinary. They become, even if just for a moment, something other than what they were.
I think it matters that Richard Barnard is a Christian. It also matters that Palestine Action connects primarily white activists from XR with anti-imperialist movements, whose cultural and political vocabulary is drawn from sources other than Western liberalism. Some of these movements don’t share XR’s stated commitment to non-violence, instead affirming the right of a colonised people to resist their oppression by all necessary means, including armed struggle. Within such coalitions, a capacity for sacrifice becomes a weapon, transcending spectacle. Palestinian militants have long understood how an experience of pain or renunciation, such as a hunger strike, can have meaning larger than its effects on a single body. After Tortuguita’s execution in Atlanta, comrades smashed bank windows and ATMs, torched construction equipment and wrote ‘Martyrs never die’ – a slogan borrowed from struggles in Rojava, and the Koran.
Makoto Shinkai’s films are mostly not about the climate. But they exist in the world, just like climate defenders. By being attentive to that world, and to the interdependent causes and conditions that give rise to our selves and lives, they tell stories which resonate with the experience of planetary catastrophe and its resistance.
The protagonists of Shinkai’s early work are not in a frame of mind to block oil tankers. They tend to be passive and existentially adrift; people often lean pensively against windows on the train. While these figures are not Shinkai, they are not always distanced from him, either: one character’s desk is ‘modelled on Mr Shinkai’s own desktop’. There is a tension here: a director identifying with his emotionally floundering young protagonists, even as he grows into his own powers as a great artist. I find this reminiscent of Mali Cooper telling the world they are a normal person, at the same time as chaining themself to a car in the middle of a highway.
Over time, Shinkai’s themes have evolved from personal alienation to broader webs of interdependence between people, a shift that can be traced via his visual motifs. He has a gift for combining existing and speculative technologies, creating metaphors for human connection that feel at once fantastic and familiar. In Voices (2002), the teenage lovers swap messages on very Nokia-looking phones but must wait longer and longer to receive each other’s texts due to time dilation – a clever representation of intimacy and distance. At its best, the effect is dizzyingly romantic. At worst, it can feel claustrophobic for the characters as much as the audience, as when Noburu wonders if ‘I’m turning into a version of myself who does nothing but wait for a message from her.’
By the era of Suzume (2022), themes of adolescent longing have given way to collective healing and trauma. Phones come to illustrate the network of shared experience binding the inhabitants of a city. As Suzume races to stop an earthquake, the first signal the rest of the population gets is when their phones shudder at the same time with a seismic warning. The emotional centre of the film is diffuse, with the heroine forming warm, transient relationships with strangers who offer practical assistance. There isn’t a conventional romance at all – instead, in a move that could only be pulled off by a gigachad of cinema, the hot guy is turned into a chair. (Please, make the joke about ‘sit on my face’. Everyone has.)
Suzume is the first Shinkai film to directly reference a real-life disaster, and it took me a couple of viewings to appreciate how sensitively it does this. By comparison, I went to see Across the Spider-Verse; a source no less than Guillermo del Toro had informed me that it would ‘fulfil and heal’ me. Sadly, it didn’t. Apart from the unwelcome discovery that the hole in my heart is not Spider-Verse shaped, I was put off by how casually images of destruction were tossed across the screen. It was as if they didn’t mean anything, which they didn’t. In one sequence, buildings in Mumbattan (a Mumbai analogue) tumble down one after the other as a host of Spider-people swing through, rescuing everyone and quipping in the Marvel-manner all the while. In Suzume, we never see an earthquake. As the ground begins to shake, the film cuts to a montage of city life: people riding trains, eating ramen, jogging in the park. The point is not to titillate, but to convey a sense of what there is to lose.
Curiously, Spider-Verse also contains a plot point where the protagonist, Miles Morales, makes a choice we have been told on good authority will unravel the fabric of the universe. Yet the same cacophony of negative response to the ethics of Weathering With You has not arisen for this film, though Miles’ decision is not morally different from Hodaka and Hina’s. To be fair, there is a sequel coming; still, we all know enough about the Sony-Marvel industrial complex to know that this story is unlikely to end with billions of dead. There’s a disjuncture, I think, between how audiences in the West have been primed to respond to depictions of sacrifice in fiction and real life. People yield up their lives for a cause all the time in film, in every story from The Hunger Games to Star Wars. It is so normalised that when a character chooses not to do this, it’s taken as an affront. Why won’t you die for us, Hina? Go on, die for us. It’s what we expect.
What fiction shies away from showing, what remains verboten to depict, is consequence. What is truly offensive is not to favour the individual over the collective, yourself over others, but to remind people that, however sympathetic your reasons, this may lead to disastrous results. Lovers are meant to be together, and Tokyo is meant to be saved. Anything less is experienced as a breach of narrative promise.
Liberal climate rhetoric – used by many who don’t call themselves liberals – is full of assertions that it is feasible to change everything and yet change nothing at all. Green cars, green jobs, green concrete, green nationalism, green steel.1 We know this isn’t possible – the earth will not bear it – but mostly choose not to talk about it. So-called Australia is a rich, imperialist country, as is Japan. On a global level, any meaningful turn towards class suicide has to include most of us.
Radical climate rhetoric – used by many who don’t do much that is radical – is full of injunctions to revolution. Jokes about doing [redacted] on a pipeline abound. What might happen to someone who actually did [redacted] also has to be [redacted]; we don’t talk about that either.
If an ethic and rhetoric of sacrifice can be found in white and Western climate movements, it is also present in the poetry and practice of Black liberation. In the forward to the Joy James collection, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, Da’Shaun Harrison writes: ‘Revolutionary Love is not about being invested in our lives, but rather it is about being invested in and knowledgeable about our deaths … It is a call to sacrifice; to sacrifice our lives, our relationships, our time, our livelihoods with the understanding that nothing is guaranteed in return.’
I don’t interpret this as meaning those of us interested in either climate or freedom need to die (although as Tortuguita’s example shows, it doesn’t not mean that, either.) But if our selves, values, and aspirations are formed in an oppressive society, not all of these can be taken with us in pursuit of liberation. Harrison writes: ‘[Revolutionary love] is about the death of Desire, and of our desires’. Intentionally or not, this echoes Buddhist teachings.
There are ways of dying which do not involve a physical death. Climate defenders may achieve something incredible at times, but this does not mean they are always nice or lovely people. It’s not uncommon for people acting in resistance to the state, with respect to climate or anything else, to act very bravely in one moment and in unethical or even abusive ways in another. Suffering isn’t ennobling. Over time, once-were militants become de-radicalised, dysfunctional; they are worn down by repression and its aftermath; they are bought off by liberalism, by clout; they enact interpersonal behaviours destructive to themselves and others. They get tired. Sometimes the cost of a moment of courage is the version of self who enacted that moment. That same person may no longer exist, once the long train of consequence has run through.
Reflecting on these themes of loss and longing, I am reminded of the end of Weathering With You, where Hodaka shouts: ‘I’ve chosen this world, I’ve chosen to live here!’ It is the assertion of a very human desire – to protect and be close to those you love. It also represents the extinguishing of another desire – if Hodaka and Hina have the chance to live and flourish, others won’t. I am struck by the film’s mix of empathy and realism, its honesty about what is needed to fight climate change alongside compassion for most people’s failure to achieve this.
Climate defenders do what they do for a liveable planet, the natural world and everyone, but their decisions can’t really be shared with other people. The act derives its effectiveness and its meaning from being part of a movement, a networked interdependency of people. But the choice itself is one that can only be made alone.
Repression is isolating, as it is meant to be: its purpose is to cut people out of networks of support that make resistance possible. Marcus Decker didn’t tell his partner he was planning to climb the Dartford Bridge. Now he faces deportation, an expulsion from the life they built together. Before the event there is secrecy, security; afterwards, bail, movement and association restrictions, other manifestations of the surveillance state. Climate defenders may be kept away from community, friends, and each other – the people most able to share their perspective and experiences.
The act of resistance is its own communication, but the people who resist need the public’s help to communicate. The state works to suppress news of direct action on climate, with a high level of compliance from journalists, intellectuals and activists. Incredibly, a Guardian article about NSW Labor’s attempted social media censorship of Blockade Australia didn’t actually mention Blockade Australia. This is one moment when shooting one’s mouth off on Twitter, Instagram, et cetera, is an act of material solidarity, amplifying the impact of the resistance and helping protect those in custody from being brutalised by guards and cops.
Participating in the legitimising and ideological apparatus of capital and state is not the same as being a cop, but it’s not innocent, either. Incentives against solidarity in a colonial-extractive economy are insidious and pervasive, including in academic, artistic and activist sectors through which readers of this essay are likely to percolate. There are concentric circles of resistance – and of complicity, as well. Prizes are underwritten by fossil capital, publications are underwritten by carceral violence, and left sociality is underwritten by not drawing attention to each other’s bullshit. Climate defenders see friends and comrades flinch away in sad, shamed avoidance. They are excluded from spaces and resources, as fellow ‘radicals’ fear catching strays from the repression. It doesn’t matter so much. They’ll be back.
‘There’s a bigger conversation that needs to happen,’ said Mali Cooper of their action on the Harbour Bridge. Look at their blank expression, the quaver in their voice as the police arrive. How very difficult it must be, even for someone as brave as Mali, to risk one’s whole self as an overture towards communication and not know if that overture will be accepted or rebuffed.
Things are bad for climate defenders in so-called ‘Australia’, but they are not that bad. In the end, much less happened to Mali Cooper than there might have done – the notorious NSW anti-protest laws under which they were charged have so far proved to be a paper tiger. It’s been two years since they were passed, and still no-one has served extended jail time. Repression is traumatic for those who experience it, but on a scale of global imperialism, this is not so much.
We do the state’s work for it when we pretend resistance is possible without risk. We also act for that state when we speak as though risk renders action impossible, as opposed to just difficult. Or when we express shock at things, such as police violence, which aren’t actually shocking, just fucked up. Under this cruelly optimistic vision, repression happens by mistake rather than being the inevitable expression of policing’s purpose. I don’t mean to say that this isn’t outrageous. What I am saying is, it is known.
Something else which is pre-known is the bounds of the disruption you can cause by ‘locking on’ – the protest tactic of chaining oneself to a piece of equipment such as a car, crane or bulldozer. For a while, there you will be. Eventually you will be removed by the cops using more or less violence, and charged or not charged as they see fit. Though the impact of such actions isn’t nothing – and ‘not nothing’ deserves honour and respect – it is also, from the authorities’ point of view, limited and containable.
Western civil disobedience tactics often entail protestors rendering themselves static and identifiable. By contrast, insurgencies around the globe emphasise speed and secrecy. Palestinian liberation fighters don’t chain themselves to anything, instead showing a commitment to fluidity and adaptation which has also been enacted in the struggle to defend the Atlanta forest. ‘Fight fire with water,’ writes one voice from that movement, quoting Fred Hampton and Mao. ‘When they attack, we escape. When they rest, we harass. When they flee, we pursue. We fight, but to our own advantage and to their disadvantage.’
While Palestinian militants don’t livestream their faces, they do tell stories about themselves. An anonymous communique circulated via Telegram writes of the martyr Samih Abu Al-Wafa: ‘Through art and through bullets, we resist and we honour. Glory to the heroes who paint the epics of resistance.’ These words are accompanied by drawings of Abu Al-Wafa in action. I’ve been told that to describe such texts and images as ‘beautiful’ is extractive, sentimentalising; that it is incommensurate with the stakes of an armed struggle. I disagree. I think it is possible for things that are beautiful to be true.
People in the West can and should be inspired by resistance elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean tactics from one time and place can be imported wholesale into another. The Black anarchist and Zen practitioner William C. Anderson writes: ‘Liberation is not a static condition or a happy ending to a movie.’ ‘I want to see more self-immolating texts… Let’s question our attachments and see what new things we can bring forth.’ It’s an ethos recalling the Hong Kong protest slogan: Be water – exactly what, in the end, Hodaka and Hina were unable to bring themselves to do.
Shinkai’s films are shaped by collective responsibility, but they are also an expression of the interior life of one remarkable artist. It’s not his style to take an ‘authoritarian’ stance, to force the audience towards a given point of view. Discussing Weathering With You, the director acknowledges the ‘righteous story’ would feature ‘one person taking on the desires of the whole population, shouldering these and then having to be a sacrifice in order for the world to regain its harmony.’
But he rejects this version:
‘For the young audience… this is a world in which they never had a choice. Before they could have a say, the world was already going crazy… What, then, can we say to that audience?
At the end of this story, the boy will shout: “The weather can stay crazy!”
Responding to his cry, the girl will actively choose to live in a crazy world.
Let’s depict a couple who will head towards a place of no return, brightly and positively. And if the audience share their choice with surprise and sympathy, we will be able to find a meaning in making this unrighteous story into a film of our times.’
On an October night in 2022 two men climbed a bridge; and in a way they are still there. It is windy up there. It is quiet. This world’s always been crazy. A man dangles from a bridge, waiting for the moment which will divide a before away from an after. In a film, the lights of Tokyo are veiled in rain.
Blockade Australia legal defence fund
With thanks to New Socialist for yet again taking on a piece which couldn’t quite find a home in so-called Australia.
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Andrew Forrest – a particularly virulent ‘Australian’ fossil tycoon descended from genocidaires who has continued the family tradition of dispossessing Aboriginal people, desecrating sacred sites and destroying the environment – is investing heavily in ‘green steel’ powered by so-called ‘green hydrogen’. The sarcastic quote marks are because a) these technologies use a metric fuckton of water, and b) they also use a fuckton of power and green energy isn’t really green. Forrest is also an architect of the cashless welfare card, a paternalistic and dehumanising means to surveil and control poor people’s spending. Obviously, this was rolled out on Aboriginal communities first. His foundation also gives out art prizes; if you accept one you are lost to this world. ↩