Two weeks ago on Armed Forces Day a group of men handing out leaflets in Blackpool was ordered by a private security firm’s employees to stop what they were doing immediately and leave the promenade. What on earth was on those leaflets? Something highly offensive, surely, to have forced the authorities into such dramatic action to prevent the public seeing […]
This fetishization of the ‘British Soldier’, emblem of the armed forces as a whole, has become pathological in its intensity in parallel with our foreign military interventions being prosecuted in an era of unprecedented political mendacity. The more profound the corruption, the greater the need for propaganda and, importantly, the cruder it needs to be as the most skilled propagandist of them all, Joseph Goebels, well understood when he declaimed that propaganda ‘must always be essentially simple and repetitious’ and must ‘appeal to the emotions and instinct, never the intellect.’ ‘Hero’, ‘Help For Heroes’, ‘our heroes overseas’, ‘our courageous men and women protecting our freedoms’, ‘protecting us’, ‘doing it for us’… ‘for us’, ‘for us’, for us’.
Outside the Royal Courts of Justice on Tuesday there were jubilant scenes from his supporters as Alexander Blackman (formerly Marine A) had his murder conviction for shooting dead a man wounded in a helicopter attack in Afghanistan reduced to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility due to a ‘combat stress disorder’. Among those celebrating were Royal Marine veterans vocal […]
“Among her achievements was to prove to other military personnel that they were correct to question the wars and entitled to refuse, resist and disobey.” It is instructive of our times that the greatest military hero of a generation became a prisoner not in the dungeons of some far-off enemy but in those of her own side. Meaningful military heroism, […]
I’ve decided never to do anything I don’t want ever again as my New Year’s resolution! I don’t like making New Year’s resolutions actually so I’ve failed quite early on there – but from now on I won’t be doing a single thing I don’t want to! I don’t do much I don’t want to as it is to be […]
The first professional army in these islands was a hothouse of debate and democracy. With the 370th anniversary of the New Model’s finest hour approaching, it is time to examine what it means to be a soldier or veteran in Britain today. Buff-coated, blood-stained To lean on the work of Geoffrey Robertson QC, one of the great biographers of the […]
Joe Glenton, who, as a soldier, was jailed for refusing a second tour of Afghanistan, is the author of Soldier Box and a member of Veterans For Peace UK. The following piece was written in May 2016 as a commentary on the Invictus Games, but we feel it’s particularly resonant on this, Armistice Day: Veterans and soldiers have no champion […]
Alastair Stewart’s Tongue Stuck up the Duchess of Camdridge’s Arse! Whence think’st thou kings and parasites arose? Whence that unnatural line of drones. who heap Toil and unvanquishable penury On those who build their palaces, and bring Their daily bread? – From vice, black loathsome vice From rapine, madness, treachery and wrong From all that ‘genders misery, and makes […]
