By Michael Faulkner – June 27, 2010
The British armed forces have been much in the news
recently. A week ago the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, visited the troops
in Afghanistan. He told them that they were doing a grand job in that far-away
land, defending the streets of Britain from terrorist attacks. Their ‘mission’
he said, echoing his two predecessors in office, could be summed up in two
words: ‘national security.’ Aware of the fact that most people in Britain do
not support the war and want the troops brought home, he asked the soldiers to
‘help me create a new atmosphere where we back and revere and support our
military’. ‘We’ll make you’, he said, ‘front and centre of British life’.
A few days later the long-awaited Saville inquiry report into
the Bloody Sunday massacre of January 30th 1972 was published. On
that day a large, peaceful demonstration in Derry, Northern Ireland, was fired
upon by soldiers of the Parachute Regiment, killing fourteen people. It has
taken 38 years to establish the truth about the killings. Those shot dead were
not, as claimed by the military and their media supporters at the time and
afterwards, armed IRA ‘terrorists’ who had opened fire on the army. They were
unarmed, innocent demonstrators supporting a peaceful rally called by the
Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. The victims – those killed and
the many more seriously wounded – were not Afghans or Iraqis, but British
citizens, residents of the United Kingdom, demonstrating against their
decades-long mistreatment at the hands of the Unionist-dominated regime in
Northern Ireland. Bloody Sunday was reminiscent of the Amritsar massacre of
1919, a pivotal event that galvanized resistance to British rule in India, and
of the Sharpville massacre of 1960 which similarly accelerated resistance to
Apartheid in South Africa.
So what, according to this exhaustive and expensive (twelve
years long and costing £195m) inquiry, actually happened. The report runs to
5.000 pages, but it main findings can be simply stated: the demonstrators,
although marching in defiance of a ban on demonstrations, was peaceful. The
parachute regiment opened fire without warning on unarmed people, shooting
fourteen of them dead. The paratroopers knew that they were firing at unarmed
people. Some were shot in the back. Others were shot dead as they lay wounded
on the ground. The soldiers lied to the inquiry, claiming that those they shot
were armed and ready to open fire.
The obfuscation that has surrounded this episode for 38
years was swept away. The earlier Widgery Report, produced in 1972 shortly
after the event, following a blatantly partial inquiry by the then Chief
Justice, was shown to be nothing short of a whitewash designed to suit the
government of the day, the parachute regiment and the reputation of the armed
forces. Those bereaved by the killings on Bloody Sunday have lived through the
years with the smear that their loved-ones were armed men aiding and abetting
IRA terrorists. As one of them said, ‘we have always known they were innocent;
now the world knows it’.
David Cameron’s statement in the House of Commons,
apologizing on behalf of the British state for the killings, which he described
as unjustified and unjustifiable, has been met with gratification by the
bereaved. It has also caused some surprise. Whatever his personal sentiments,
there is an obvious political purpose behind Cameron’s unequivocal statement.
To have done anything less than fully endorsing the Saville report would have
run the serious risk of enraging the nationalist community in Northern Ireland.
The peace process there is still fragile and could easily be upset. Against
this he has had to weigh the sensitivities of the armed forces, particularly
with the prospect of soldiers being prosecuted for their actions and for lying
to the tribunal. His remarks in Afghanistan, made on the eve of the report’s
publication, must be seen in that light. Taken all in all his comments add up
to this: despite a few regrettable and inexcusable lapses by a small,
unrepresentative minority of our soldiers in the past, we have the best armed
forces in the world. The nation should be proud of them and we should honour
them. It’s the old story of a few rogue elements. For the rest, wherever they
are serving, they are, in the language of the tabloids ‘our boys’ or ‘our brave
soldiers’. Serious criticism of the military has always been subject to a
strong taboo. To question the myth of the armed forces as the selfless
defenders of the realm is to lay oneself open to the charge of being
unpatriotic or worse. Servicemen killed in combat are always said to have
‘given their lives for their country.’ They are the ‘defenders of our freedom’ and
without their gallant sacrifice we could all be subjected to an alien tyranny.
It is a sedulous myth which few dare to challenge. So, whether or not there is
public support for particular wars in which they may be engaged, everyone is
expected to support ‘our’ armed forces. It is a patriotic duty. Can such an
attitude be justified? There is another way of looking at it.
Since the end of the Second World War British forces have
been engaged in numerous armed conflicts around the world. From the late 1940s
these have included, between 1948 and 1960, intervention in Malaya to crush an
indigenous peasant insurgency, a prolonged war in Kenya against the Kikuyu
movement for colonial independence, involvement on the side of the U.S. in the
Korean War, the invasion of Egypt during the so-called Suez crisis, engagement
against the independence movement in Cyprus. In each of these cases conscripted
servicemen, mostly aged between 18 and 20 and therefore below voting age, were
involved. Later, from the 1960s to the 80s, British forces have been deployed
to Aden, ‘East of Suez’ and to the Falkland islands. In most cases they were
sent to fight colonial wars to hold the last outposts of the former empire.
Since the 1960s the longest engagement of British troops has been the
deployment to Northern Ireland. And finally, since 2001, they have been
involved in the catastrophic illegal invasion of Iraq and the equally
disastrous war in Afghanistan. In none of these cases, from the 1940s to today,
has their engagement been to defend Britain from attack. The claim that the present Afghan imbroglio
is about keeping Britain’s streets safe from terrorists has as much credibility
as Blair’s claim, used to justify the invasion of Iraq, that Saddam Hussein
possessed WMDs capable of hitting Britain within 45 minutes.
The armed forces are agencies of state power. In Britain
their hierarchical composition reflects the social class structure. In a
professional, non-conscript army most of the lower ranks are recruited from
working class communities, often with high levels of unemployment. Many
recruits are poorly educated and lacking in self-discipline and
self-sufficiency. The armed forces mould them into shape and provide the
support structures that would otherwise be lacking in their lives. In Britain
the great majority of recruits are white. Engagement overseas, usually in
conflicts against non-white combatants (Asians, Africans, Koreans, Iraqis,
Afghans) serves to exacerbate racist attitudes that are frequently already
entrenched. All wars brutalize those who fight them. Wars waged by former
colonial powers with post-imperial delusions of grandeur, such as Britain, will
also involve a large dose of racism. This is manifest in the derogatory
terminology used against an enemy perceived to be something less than fully
human. ‘Wogs’, ‘gooks’, ‘ragheads’, ‘greasers’ have been the common currency of
Britain’s colonial and post colonial wars. The indoctrinated soldier serving in
the front line and facing danger every day develops a sense of superiority over
civilian society, a belief that those in ‘civvy street’ are complacent softies
who don’t realize that they owe their freedom to the armed forces. Such a
mentality, carried to an extreme, characterized the gung-ho members of the Parachute
regiment who fired into a crowd of unarmed civilians in January 1972 killing
fourteen of them. This was the mentality of those who were responsible for the
deaths of tens of thousands of Kikuyu in Kenya between 1952 and 1960.
More recently, it was the same mentality that prompted
soldiers of the Duke of Lancaster’s regiment in 2003 to kick and punch to death
Iraqi hotel worker Baha Musa, inflicting on him 93 injuries, including broken
skull and ribs, on him in the process. And, just as officers and soldiers of
the Parachute regiment lied about Bloody Sunday in 1972, an officer in the Baha
Musa case tried to mount an ‘arse-covering’ exercise after his murder.
Tellingly, another officer of the regiment revealed that his soldiers
considered that ‘all Iraqis were scum’. It was revealed that amongst members of
the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment serving in Iraq, ‘poor treatment of prisoners
was common during the tour’.
None of this is surprising. Recruits are put through a
training regime characterized by extreme bullying designed to ‘break them in’,
to render them totally submissive to orders from their ‘superiors’ and yet
capable of acting, if required, with unhesitating ruthlessness against those
designated as ‘the enemy’. In recent years the appalling excesses of this
regime have been exposed at the British army’s Deepcut Barracks, where, between
1995 and 2002 four recruits met their deaths in suspicious circumstances. It
was revealed that a ‘culture of bullying, sexual abuse and sadism towards young
recruits’ prevailed there. In 2004 100 accusations of rape, indecent assault
and degrading treatment were reported.
Large numbers of ex-servicemen are ill-equipped to adjust to
civilian life and finish up in jail. There is some evidence that many soldiers
serving in Afghanistan sympathize with extreme right-wing racist and fascist
organizations in Britain. The English Defence League – a violent racist
group that has recently been involved in large-scale anti-Islamic
demonstrations, apparently enjoys support in the armed forces. A spokeswoman
for the organization, herself married to a serving soldier, claimed that ‘the
soldiers are fighting Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Iraq and the EDL are
fighting it here. Not all the armed forces support the EDL, but a majority
does’
Whatever the case may be about support for the EDL amongst
servicemen, the words chosen by David Cameron, supposedly intended to express
the gratitude of society for the fight they are waging in Afghanistan, are
really quite alarming. He quoted a few lines of sub-Kiplingesque doggerel
penned by the neo-con US army veteran Charles M Province:
‘It’s not the politician that brings the right to vote, it
is the Soldier; it is not the poet that brings free speech, it is the Soldier.’
Should anyone dismiss this as no more than a few words of
gratitude from a politician wishing to ingratiate himself with his military
audience, it is worth reproducing Province’s paean ‘It is the Soldier’ in full:
It is the Soldier, not the minister, who has given us
freedom of religion.
It is the Soldier, not the reporter, who has given us
freedom of the press.
It is the Soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of
speech.
It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given
us freedom to protest.
It is the Soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the
right to a free trial.
It is the Soldier, not the politician, who has given us the
right to vote.
It is the Soldier who salutes the flag
Who serves beneath the flag
And whose coffin is draped by the flag
Who allows the protester to burn the flag.
Let’s make no mistake about it, this sentimental drivel is
the stuff that fascism is made of. It expresses the sentiments that lead to
military coups. To those who think like this the long, hard struggle for civil
and democratic rights in Britain, waged by the Chartists, the women’s suffrage
movement, the trade unions and all those through centuries who have fought to
extend our liberties, amount to nothing. Democracy is supposed to be a gift
from the military. To this dangerous nonsense there can be only one response:
Absolutely not.