I read today in the BBC’s article Cameron wants nation to appreciate armed forces that the UK’s new prime minister thinks Britons should take pride in everything their armed soldiers do. Actually he goes even further than that, and says he wants the military to be front and centre of our national life
.
Why not, man? Who wouldn’t want to be proud of a military that is responsible for (plus, I am sure, approximately one billion other things):
- the brutal beating to death of an Iraqi man, who at the time of death had ninety-three separate injuries [1]
- the “routine” use of banned “interrogation techniques” [2]
- secret squads holding prisoners in stress positions, hooding them, and telling them their mothers and sisters will be raped [3]
- executing prisoners, forcing other prisoners to listen to their deaths, and mutilating Iraqi corpses [4]
- handing over many, many prisoners to be tortured by Afghan agencies [5]
- …and Iraqi agencies [6]
- trashing the homes of Iraqis whose houses they raid [7]
- participating in the occupations of foreign countries, with all the immorality and abuses that entails (I don’t think you need a source for this one; it’s pretty obvious that the UK’s armed forces occupy foreign countries)
Furthermore, the British military has historically been in all sorts of objectionable endeavours — maintaining and expanding the British Empire, for a start. The British military invented concentration camps, imprisoning 100,000 Boer women and children in them (of which 28,000 died) and meting out even worse treatment to Africans. In the time I spent trying to look for articles about British abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, I also found articles about abuses longer ago in Kenya and India, and we all know how amazingly well the British treated the Irish (i.e. not).
If Cameron’s going to say the military needs to be at the “front and centre of national life”, just like during the First and Second World Wars (quoth him: In the First World War those at home didn’t just sing ‘keep the home fires burning’, they practised it. In the Second World War, the military occupied a huge place in the national consciousness, partly because everyone knew someone in uniform.
) — I assume he supports all of this!
Having the military as the symbol of the nation is screwed up. Let’s celebrate violence and obedience to authority as the most cherished values of our nation, right? Let’s celebrate people whose patriotism goes so far that they torture other people, or kill other people, and let’s celebrate the institutions that, far from condemning this behaviour, do their best to cover this up. And let’s also celebrate an institution that is, lest we forget, completely useless when there’s no war going on, encouraging a situation of permanent war.
Yes Cameron, your prime ministership is certainly off on an excellently humanist note. Now let’s make it even more humanist by celebrating death and torture. Yay!
