Militancy and Media
Good morning, friends. It turns out that while I’m generally unable to work on my poetry and prose before midday, I can still write somewhat critically, and so, while that lasts, I figure I might as well put it to use here. For some reason (an arbitrary one, I know), my idiot brain registers this as “productive” where Twitter isn’t.
In any case, today’s fuckery is brought to you by accused war-criminal Ben Roberts-Smith, who apparently liked to wear a Crusaders cross on his uniform as he (allegedly) committed several unspeakably evil acts in Afghanistan. Defence forces were aware of this, and airbrushed it out of a photo they subsequently distributed to the press, back when they were still upholding the man as a patriotic symbol of murderous Australian masculinity. In fact, they were so committed to his heroism that rather than reflect on what wearing such a symbol indicated about the man, they covered it up. At the time, as swiftly as this is now being erased, Ben Roberts-Smith was on a fast-track to celebrity. He was on the morning TV shows, and there were glowing profiles in the papers about this Anglo titan, complete with cartoon depictions of him charging at swarthy, bearded Afghans in turbans. In the wake of a photo showing him grinning with the prosthetic leg of a murdered Afghan that Australian soldiers liked to drink beer from, and allegations in court that he committed at least six murders of innocent Afghans, this celebrity treatment… has continued. As recently as January, the Daily Mail ran a piece titled “Ben Roberts-Smith debuts his new girlfriend at the races.”
The glorification of the military in Australia has been ongoing for many years now. From the unnecessary $500 million dollar expansion of the Australian War Memorial, to the national hounding of Yassmin Abdel-Magied for a seven-word Facebook post on Anzac Day, to the celebrity promotion of soldiers, to the current Prime Minister using uniformed military personnel in national crises like the Black Summer bushfires, or more recently in the pandemic—this ugly merging of media and military propaganda is deliberate and deeply concerning. Billionaire Kerry Stokes, chairman of Seven West Media, who sits on the board of the Australian War Memorial, is funding the legal defence of Ben Roberts-Smith (who, until these allegations, was also Stokes’ employee, and the general manager of Seven Network in Queensland) as well as other special forces accused of war crimes. It really is that astonishingly unsubtle.
I find today’s article particularly interesting, given the quote from the Australia Defence Association executive director Neil James stating that the image was “wrong morally”. Wearing paraphernalia such as the Crusader cross, the Punisher symbol, and flying a Nazi flag was common and alarming enough in Australian forces that Lt. General Campbell had to issue a directive in 2018 banning “death symbology and iconography”. You would think that since the West invested serious effort in branding ISIS and other “Islamist” terrorist groups as death cults, this directive would be totally in keeping with the framing of “our good guys with guns” versus the other guys with guns, and therefore uncontroversial. And yet, this article in the ABC describes the move as unpopular among the troops, and outlines such arguments against it as “death symbology is good for morale”. In an aside, the writer also notes that “parallels have already been drawn between Lieutenant General Campbell and his predecessor, Lieutenant General David Morrison, whose diversity crusades made him less-than-loved by the troops.” The emphasis there is mine.
I’m thinking about the flippant tone here, and the insidious marriage of diversity to crusade—literal slaughter—which echoes a key white supremacist talking point that characterises equality as an erasure of whiteness, the “great replacement”. I’m thinking about the way words carry history far more profoundly and permanently than any gaudy memorial could, the way I am taken immediately to this article I wrote in 2015, in which an Arab cabbie told me that an old white passenger only recently remarked to him that “we need to have another Crusade soon.” (Tangent: that we is so very interesting, in the context of borders and acceptability). It made me think, too, of this article in The Herald Sun, literally depicting Peter Dutton, one of the most powerful men in Australia, as a Knights Templar, whose “crusade” against mostly Muslim refugees and immigrants was hailed as the reason conservatives won the election.
That was published in May 2019, two months after the Christchurch massacre, where an Australian man slaughtered 51 Muslims as they prayed. This is the degree to which Islamophobia is the norm in this country—two months after the mass murder of Muslims in New Zealand by an Australian extremist, this article’s framing and imagery were seen as permissible for a national paper. Now we have this claim that such imagery—and one imagines, its accompanying rhetoric—is morally wrong. It’s not that I disagree, obviously, it’s just interesting to note given we have an evangelical Prime Minister who is on the record as wanting to prioritise Christian refugees over others, making faith the basis for whose lives we deign to save. We subsequently enacted this policy, directly or indirectly, with 78% of refugees accepted between 2015 and 2017 identifying themselves as Christian.
The question becomes, then: how deep does this immorality go, and where do you draw the line? Yes, Ben Roberts-Smith wore a badge with a cross on it, invoking Christian supremacy in the Middle East, as he killed Muslims “legitimately” and allegedly, illegally. (Needless to say, fuck that bullshit distinction right to hell). But are we to believe, as the ADF clearly did, that it’s fine if the badge was empty? Are we to pretend that there isn’t a relentless wave of Islamophobic rhetoric in this nation, sufficient not only to inspire civilians to mass murder Muslims, but in fact to make this particular iconography perfectly in keeping with our mainstream media and politics? Can we summon enough outrage to begin to reckon not only with what the man chose to wear—with what he did—but also the nation and the circumstances that produced him?