In the short analysis I am about to present, I speak within the Enlightenment tradition and its commitment to dialogue, debate and, above all, the scepticism and doubt which guides argument. Much of what follows will reproach not so much that tradition, but what that tradition has become.

In light of what I am about to say, I want to make two things clear: first, notwithstanding that I am speaking at a conference on peace and in a session justifiably and righteously critical of violence, I nevertheless assent to the proposition that, in some cases, self-defence, or the redress of gross injustice, requires violence. If I had to summarise my position, and I have to say that I am unhappy with the term myself, it is that of a ‘just war pacifist’ – someone who believes that it’s possible to conceive of a just war – though almost impossible to find one historically. Second, and relatedly, nothing I say here should be taken as derogatory of the deaths and sufferings which Australians and others have incurred in many wars in response to the orders of governments that, in the national interest, they should fight, kill, destroy, and maybe die.

Specifically, then, what I will do is set out a series of observations and then suggest connections between them in a way which hopefully is empathetic to the objectives of this gathering. My argument is that what we tolerate, and even more, what we venerate, discloses who we are in 4general and what the true limits to our repudiation of violence are. Unless we examine these objects with a rigorous and undiscriminating scepticism, we cannot, even remotely, begin to understand our embeddedness in unacknowledged, but nevertheless approved, violence.

Commemorated violence

I start with an observation from Australia’s national capital in Canberra. Along one of its more prominent thoroughfares – ANZAC Avenue – are numerous memorials to those who have served and died in the now many wars that Australia has participated in. The whole precinct speaks to commemorated violence. It is, of course, connected to the Australian War Memorial – an impressive building and one built with honourable intentions. I now approach it with a sense of deep foreboding as per the memorial’s website.

At KidsHQ, children are challenged by way of a video, to “see if you can bust the dam” – as did the famous Dam Busters of 617 Squadron (AWM 2008b). Left unmentioned is the fact that the Dam Busters’ raid was of dubious legality under the Laws of War as they existed, and was arguably a war crime. At the online shop, Shop Spotlight, you can order Bush Camouflage Bear with Disruptive Pattern Camouflage Uniform and/or a Vietnam Digger Bear (AWM 2008c). And in the memorial’s Discovery Zone – the “hands-on [family-oriented] education space” made available through “cutting edge museum technology” – you can “experience the life of a chopper pilot in Vietnam” (AWM 2008a). The website shows a photograph of a 10-12-year old, in a junior flight suit, headphones on, strapped into the pilot’s seat of a display Iroquois helicopter. But the choice is wide, both historically and in the sense of the virtual experiences on offer. An Australian War Memorial media release (2007) advises that, from July 2007, the “family-friendly interactive gallery experience will also include the ability to: “Dodge sniper fire in a First World War trench. Peer through the periscope of a Cold War submarine.” The invitation, particularly to children, is to “climb, jump, crawl, touch and explore in all areas of the Discovery Zone … [which] … looks, feels and even smells different to the Memorial’s other galleries.” In Canberra, there is no peace memorial, or tribute to those who have pursued it, or even to those who have opposed war. 5

For those who might think that too much is being made of this well-funded popularisation of wartime experience and that overall it is at worst a neutral influence of the national culture, there I would refer them to reports in the metropolitan dailies that Australian Defence Force personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq were “ashamed of wearing their Australian uniform”, because they were being assigned low-risk missions (Pearlman 2008). Regardless of the operational basis of the claim, it should be a matter of high concern that, in response to the report, the following comment was posted:

Sacrifice

A second observation: just a few hundred metres from where we are meeting today (the Customs House on Circular Quay), there is another memorial, the ANZAC Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park South. The central motif of the design is Rayner Hoff’s The Sacrifice, officially described as a bronze group of sculptures depicting the recumbent figure of a young warrior who has made the supreme sacrifice; his naked body lies upon a shield which is supported by three womenfolk – his best loved mother, wife and sister and in the arms of one is a child, the future generations for whom the sacrifice has been made. According to the associated educational publicity, “it illustrates the sacrifice engendered by war, self-sacrifice for duty and the beautiful quality of womanhood which, in the war years, with quiet courage and noble resignation, bore its burdens, the loss of sons, husbands and lovers” (ANZAC Memorial, Sydney).

It is a striking sculpture – far more appropriate to its subject matter than the much larger project in Canberra – yet also disturbing because it deceives. It cannot speak of the event which took the lives that it commemorates – The Great War – and the politics of neurotic nationalism 6of a European order in decay, well described by Ezra Pound (1920) as “a botched civilization / an old bitch gone in the teeth.”

It deceives, too, when it uses the term ‘sacrifice’. As US Admiral Gene LaRocque had the honesty to put it, “I hate it when they say, ‘He gave his life for his country.’ Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honour and glory of their country. We kill them” (Turkel 1984, pp. 185–189). Many decades before, of course, Kipling (1919, p. 141), with ample reason, had written of the dead on the Western Front: “If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

Money in war

A third observation is that there is money in war. I don’t wish to quote forever, but there are times and occasions when it is needed. Consider this – a soldier’s recollection:

The writer was Smedley Darlington Butler, twice awarded the United States highest award for valour, The Medal of Honour. In contemporary times, nothing has changed.

Currently, members of the United States Congress have as much as $196 million collectively invested in companies doing business with the Defense Department and have earned millions since the start of the Iraq war, according to a new study by a non-partisan research group. The review of lawmakers’ 2006 financial disclosure statements by Lindsay Renick Mayer (2008) at the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics suggests that members’ holdings could pose a conflict of interest as they decide the fate of Iraq war spending. To be noted is the fact that several members who earned the most from defence contractors have significant committee or leadership assignments, including Democratic Senator John Kerry, independent Senator Joseph Lieberman and House Republican Whip Roy Blunt. Overall, 151 members hold investments that earned them anywhere between $15.8 million and $62 million between 2004 and 2006.

According to Mayer (2008), “[s]o common are these companies, both as personal investments and as defence contractors, it would appear difficult [for an American investor] to build a diverse blue-chip stock  8portfolio without at least some of them.” Even John Kerry, a Democrat who staunchly opposes the war in Iraq and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is identified as earning the most – at least $2.6 million between 2004 and 2006 from investments worth up to $38.2 million. And the reaction to this in both the US media and here in Australia? It is best described as the Buster Keaton School of Political Analysis: genuine and total impassivity in the face of ethical, political, social, scientific and economic crises which threaten democratic government. “We the people”, it seems, have become “we the governed”.

Junk politics

Thus, a fourth observation: we live in the time of unrepresentative democracy, in which opposition parties are no more than the governing party in exile – to use a phrase increasingly common, this is a vacuous state we might now justly call the age of ‘junk politics’. As one astute observer has written of another place – but a place towards which Australian social and political trends are increasingly vectored:

Child-like, those affected are deprived of a decent politically and historically informed understanding and remain forever in the thrall of what the French call infantilisme. Deprived, that is, of any understanding which would emphasise the continuity of things, they cannot comprehend the ways in which cherished values are subverted. 9

And today? By way of just one example, I have waited in vain for nearly seven years for someone to make the link between, on the one hand, current US behaviour, and on the other hand, the historical precedent set by the Spanish Inquisition. Despite that it holds torture to be legally proscribed and morally reprehensible, through the device of ‘extraordinary rendition’, the US has no difficulty with selected prisoners, clothed in orange overalls, being held without legal representation, accused anonymously in many cases, being interrogated, maltreated, and even tortured, and then deported illegally to another country which acts as an agent of the United States. Where, regardless of their guilt or innocence, they are without legal counsel, are tortured and frequently murdered in the process. Their deaths are excused by holding them to be an avoidable consequence of the need to combat a ‘clear and present danger’ to an imperial project requiring uniformity of belief and practice.

Is there not a remarkably unnerving equality between current US policy as outlined and the practices in Spain during the 15th and 16th centuries? Under Tomas de Torquemada, suspects were arrested without divulging the reasons for doing so and charged on the basis of testimony by anonymous witnesses or information which had not been communicated to the accused.

They were made aware that torture was a definite prospect and, if insufficiently forthcoming, actually tortured in their own account, and/or for the purpose of confessing knowledge of the crimes of others. Consider, too, that access to legal advice for defence was available but the advocates in question were no more than officials of the Inquisition, dependent upon, and working with it. Those convicted were forced to wear either a yellow or a black (depending on the sentence) penitential garment – the sanbenito – which signified infamy. Those wearing a black sanbenito (the condemned) were “relaxed” to the civil authorities – the Church being legally and morally proscribed from torture and execution – to be executed (Kamen 1998, pp. 189–210).

In writing this chapter, I have been unable to reconcile this refusal to confront what seems to be such an obvious historical comparison. At first blush it is exceedingly strange for a country whose dominant 10Christian beliefs and traditions reflect the Reformation; then again, perhaps that is the explanation.

At issue here is an obscene, violent excess committed by states and their agencies which are directly responsible, indirectly responsible, or culpably inactive. Like all great institutional excesses, they first create their own powerful opposition, then the demise of the institution, and finally, its epitaph – along the lines borrowed selectively from Nizar Qabbani’s banned poem of 1967, ‘Footnotes to the book of the setback’ (pp. 97–101):

In other words, we need to take the world as it is available to be known seriously – as deliberate and strategic, rather than an accidental and tactical construction. And if we do, the prospect is, in my view, clear and frightening.

Ur-fascism

My fifth observation is that the situation is worse than most of us think. Junk Politics is a stalking horse for something else, and the ‘something else’ is something we thought was over. In 1995, The New York Review of Books featured an essay by the Italian semiotician, Umberto Eco, titled ‘Ur-fascism’, by which he meant original, or eternal fascism – fascism not beholden to only the more familiar versions which we think have receded and are receding further.

In a reduced form, Ur-fascism is identified by the following common axioms:

12If we take a step backwards, in effect to translate ourselves to another level of abstraction, we understand that this ideology, or theodicy, was conceived in destruction and renewal, born of hope, in the spirit of surrender, and the imperative of a new beginning which Heidegger captured as the realisation that “[o]nly a god can save us”, and Jung as “the right moment … for a metamorphosis of the gods.”

Divine justice

But my sixth observation is that Heidegger and Jung were wrong: God is not the answer, at least the God which informs so much of Western opposition to violence. Consider the Bible: in terms of an example of pathologically vengeful content, if the fundamentalist account of history found in the Old Testament is, as claimed, literally true, then equally it is deserving of Mark Twain’s dismissal of it as “noble poetry … some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history … a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies”. Where the same fundamentalists invoke the Almighty Father, Twain’s rage is undiminished:

13What Twain achieves through critical ridicule, others have reinforced philosophically by addressing the question of Divine Evil – by which they mean the evil which, if the relevant texts are taken seriously and literally, God himself commits.

In duration and intensity, these dwarf the kinds of suffering and sin to which the standard versions allude. For God has prescribed torment for insubordination. The punishment is to go on forever, and the agonies to be endured by the damned intensify, in unimaginable ways, the sufferings we undergo in our earthly lives. In both dimensions, time and intensity, the torment is infinitely worse than all the suffering and sin that will have occurred during the history of life in the universe. What God does is thus infinitely worse than what the worst of tyrants have done (Lewis & Kitcher 2007).

In the context of what I am saying, the significance of this conclusion is that it goes to the heart of the concerns of the matter – even to believers of a more relaxed dispensation in, say, the tradition of Erasmus.

To the extent that they, for now at least, practise a form of Christian humanism and tolerance, they can be thought of as unthreatening; but, at the same time, to the extent that they believe in and worship the perpetrator of divine evil, are they not themselves evil? Erasmus, after all, proposed only that theological disputes incapable of being settled during our earthly lifetimes should be left to the hereafter; this, of course, had to include the possibility of infinite punishment as I have just outlined.

And should this accusation apply whether the believers are those who, through their belief in their god, would also commit the same evil if commanded from above, or whether, in a spirit of humility, they consider themselves unworthy to execute such a warrant but give themselves to its author all the same? Under both dispensations they worship and thus endorse the author of eternal divine evil. It is seen as otherwise of course – as divine justice and the rightful damning of sinners; yet overall, is this not really a question of who does what, and under what rubric? If so, it remains the case that, for them, paradise is to be inhabited by ‘committed misanthropes’.

The popularly understood New Testament offers little relief from out-right rejection. Basically the problem is that the Christian Church(es) 14founded upon it are undifferentiated from many other human societies in that they subscribe to a belief in a “founding murder” – as well as in scapegoats “sacrificed to avert threats to the community”. Thus, the ensuing community “builds itself around shared enmity and seals its bond by the sacrifice of the object of its fear” – an act of “creative destruction” which, in turn, brings forth a sacred, salvational outcome. The nature of the transaction is clear enough: something has to be destroyed in order that the people in question might live. The object, just as clearly, is to placate, flatter and bribe a violent god, or set of gods.

Life is thus oppressed by rites and sacrifices of “condoned violence” which are themselves products of hatred and “unreasoning contagions of panic”. But these are nevertheless validated and controlled according to the illogic of the foundational act. Specifically, we might concern ourselves with the established belief that Jesus’ agony, crucifixion and death are seen as the necessary sacrifice to buy off an aggressive Father, that Jesus is an “item of barter” in the exchange system, and thus, that God accepts sacrifices in “a logic of placation”. In and of itself, this is an act of grand and deadly self-deception; when fused with the foundational myths of nation and state, the compound is sacred violence and the persistence of a violent political theology.2

In recent Western intellectual tradition, collegiality, civility, respect, tolerance, and perhaps affection have demanded and currently require a declaratory state of peaceful coexistence between all parties of all beliefs. This accommodation works very much the way quantum mechanics works in the discipline of physics; it isn’t understood, but is used with great effect all the same.

The effect of the deep background is what worries me. It is at best a flawed accommodation but, I suspect, one that will not be challenged except by a few. And even then it will be met with the responses which

15Morris West (1996, p. 109) so insightfully captured in the Pontificate: examination will be deemed non expedit (it is not expedient), or non e opportune (it is not timely) or simply fiat! (surrender – let it be done thus!).

Final thoughts

We are fascinated with violence; equally we are illiterate in understanding how our own traditions and practices which ostensibly honour peace require a more suspecting glance than they are accorded. No discussion of nonviolence is possible without such a stringent examination of conscience. And it must be done in circumstances far from ideal, and which Bertolt Brecht foretold in his 1941 play The resistible rise of Arturo Ui: