Introduction

Growing up in north-eastern Australia was peaceful. For the last half of the twentieth century it was free from war. In small town life the historical violence against the Aboriginal population was seldom talked about, if at all common knowledge for most. War, violence and killing were always things that seemed distant. Such distance was historical and physical. We were told that wars had occurred in the past and overseas – World War I (1914-18), World War II (1939-45), Korea (1950-53) and Vietnam (1954-75) – and we were asked to remember them, at least once or twice a year. As children we were told reflect upon the sacrifices made in war by those before us, by those who offered their lives for our nation, for our freedom. On particular days of remembrance, school children would march together

with ex-soldiers and widows in a parade through the main street of the town. There was usually some type of band, maybe bagpipes, a few speeches and a minute of silence. I remember in those moments of enforced silence feeling sad, feeling sorrow for those who died in the horrors of war. I remember feeling some form of connection to them, a thankfulness, but also an overwhelming weight that the image of their dead bodies and the public ritual of remembrance forced upon me. Forced also was both a sense of condemnation and justification of killing. These were tied together in an uncomfortable way: ‘thou shalt not kill’; and the killing that ‘saved’ the nation. We were asked to remember the men, the soldiers who killed and were killed. In a sense, the birth, the defence and security of the nation, the state, the community, were bound to the killers and the killed. We were asked not to forget, so we said, ‘lest we forget’. But what and who were we meant to remember? The ritual of remembering was also one of forgetting, or ignoring. The

public and official birth story of the colonies that became the Australian nation is that of ‘discovery’. For many others, and most importantly for many Aboriginals, this discovery was an invasion – a public, official, drawn-out, violent process of taking the land from one group of peoples and giving it to another. A colonial legal order founded and built upon violence and the legal

legitimization of this violence – an act of genocide. Such violence was never included within official public rituals of remembrance. Those killed were never offered a minute’s silence. They were placed outside the register of public mourning and edification. Lest we forget. Sitting behind the differing registers of the memory of violence are compet-

ing and often conflicting normative justifications of past and present violence. To remember some acts of war and killing and to forget or ignore others involves an act of justification. Public remembrance in a ritual, in a speech, or in a school textbook is built upon a justification, often after the event, of particular acts of violence as legitimate and the condemnation of others as illegitimate. The violence of the past is viewed and legitimated through the lens of the present, we call certain acts right or wrong even though we were never actually there. And even though we were not there, we claim to know what was right then in the same sense as we claim to know what is right now. But what do we know of the rightness of killing? What do we know about the right and wrong of war, terror, and violence? Such things are hard to know, even harder to know with any certainty. The present is linked to the violence of the past. It is linked casually and this

cannot be denied. The justification of violence in the present is linked to the justification of the violence in the past. However, this latter link, because it operates via memory, representation, argument and judgment, is more tenuous and it sits within a realm of social, political, ethical and legal contestation. Because the causal violence of history never exists on its own, but only within the register of our knowledge and the self-representation of our own deeds, the link between the violence of the present and the past is complicated by our ongoing, conflicting practices of justification and legitimation. In this case, our knowledge of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of past violence is shaped and manipulated by the concerns of the present and by the irresistible demands of the future. The ethical demand of the future creates a picture of the past for us, a picture

which stands as a firm foundation and a reassurance of the rightness of our actions in the present. Yet, an ethical demand of the future does not come from nowhere but responds to an image of the past – a period of glory, a golden age, a moment of moral purity, a tragic story, or a history of oppression, bloodshed, and genocide. What we claim as legitimate killing in the present, the just war, or the illegal act of terror, sits within our knowledge and self-representation of the past and the future. Each of these feed off and are constituted by the other. On the back of mumbled children’s stories, broken images and grand, untrustworthy speeches we are driven into action and pass judgment on the rightness of killing that does violence to our fellow humans – and, lest we forget, an infinite violence against non-human animals. On days of public remembrance childhood moments stay with us, they help

us to keep track of our past selves marked against our changing responses to ourselves over time. In 1989, at around the age of 10, maybe close to 11, I was

watching with my family a news programme on the Salman Rushdie blasphemy controversy. I remember hearing the religious edict given by Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini that Rushdie should be killed and the next day at primary school, during a full school parade, I sat with a sign fixed to my back saying ‘Kill Rushdie’. If my teachers were cautious, my father was angry, straightforward and unimpressed. My actions met with his sharp response – ‘It is not right to kill anyone.’ For Muslims too, the injunction ‘thou shalt not kill’ is central to ethical life. Yes, ‘thou shalt not kill’, but we do and we do it all of the time. The pre-

sent is marked by war, violence and killing justified by some and condemned by others. Terrorist bombings such as those in New York and Washington, DC (2001), and the invasion and continued occupation of Afghanistan (2001-) and Iraq (2003-) are fresh in our memories. Some also continue to remember the first Gulf War (1990-91) and the subsequent ten years of sanctions and bombing that involved the murder of tens of thousands of civilians, mostly children, legitimated by international law and carried out by the United Nations and Western liberal democracies. There have been other prominent wars, such as the ‘humanitarian war’ of NATO’s bombing of Serbia-Kosovo (1999) and various other acts of war, civil war, revolution, terror and violence that we do not, or choose not to, remember. In light then of the very regular human practice of killing, perhaps the injunction ‘thou shalt not kill’ should be amended. Perhaps the injunction is better stated as follows: ‘thou shalt not kill without good reasons, without a strong justification’; or, ‘thou shalt kill only in accordance with right’. It is not killing as such, but the rightness and wrongness of killing that seem to be at issue. When, then, is it right to kill, to launch into acts of war and terror? What is

a ‘good justification’ for legitimate killing, and how do we determine the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of war, violence and terror? How do we pass such an act of judgment and what distinguishes the good reasons given by a politician, lawyer or a philosopher from the judgment of a naive child who places a sign upon his back? Are we all still really children, or, do we have firm and fair accounts (ethical, political, legal or otherwise) that guide us through our judgments over the rightness and wrongness of acts of killing – and more specifically, that guide us through judgments over the legitimacy and illegitimacy of acts of war, violence and terror?