Jeff Sparrow and ‘Killing’

Jeff Sparrow

When Jeff Sparrow began the research process for his book Killing, he found that ‘talking about killing is like talking about sex’: there are a whole series of anxieties that will influence people’s answers. Nevertheless, he found the topic fascinating and its exploration necessary, as ‘we have a responsibility to confront these issues’, particularly in light of the fact that, indirectly, we ask or allow people to kill every day.

After Sparrow first began exploring this controversial topic, spurred by the unearthing of a Turkish soldier’s head in Echuca, he found that very little research had actually been done, and that the existing research was a body of contradictions. His first step towards understanding killing and its effects on the killers was to spend some time with kangaroo hunters, as animal slaughter was a common analogy made by soldiers describing the experience of killing another human being for the first time.

In response to Sophie Cunningham’s question, ‘Are we desensitised towards killing?’, Sparrow described how the contemporary act of killing is generally mediated, at least in state-sanctioned contexts, and this gives rise to problems of its own. While society, in addition to individual killers or executioners, has always been implicated in the carrying out of killing, there is now much less direct or individual human involvement in state-sanctioned killing. Compared to medieval executions, which were gruesome public ceremonies, Sparrow described modern execution — as practised in the United States — as a sanitised, private, bureaucratic process, with protocols and tiny components that are rehearsed to the point of mechanics. This ostensibly makes execution easier for the executioner, but Sparrow said it means they don’t feel anything at all, and this itself becomes the trauma.

Sparrow raised some fascinating issues regarding killing and class. He suggested that killing is generally done by working-class people, and that there is no inter-class vocabulary to discuss this. We’re not even supposed to talk about it. Meanwhile, working-class people were being persuaded to contribute to the war machine by ‘the transformative narrative of war’. Sparrow spoke of the World War II anti-war poets who challenged this narrative as untrue; who discovered that war comprised not only awful acts of killing, but the same menial things they did at home; who realised that the reality of war is being a cog in the army’s bureaucracy.

Truly a fascinating topic, examined by a passionate and compassionate individual. I’m looking forward to reading Killing: it’s in my book stack, and ready to go.

Estelle Tang, 3000 BOOKS
Festival Blogger