For an alleged war criminal fighting to clear his reputation in the Federal Court, we certainly keep hearing a lot of very unsavoury things about former special forces officer Ben Roberts-Smith. The latest detail, reported in the Nine papers, was that Roberts-Smith wore a patch with crusader insignia while fighting in Afghanistan. The Department of Defence later doctored the image to remove the patch before sending it to the Australian War Memorial.
Defence won’t respond to questions about why the image was edited, instead telling Crikey it “does not condone or permit the use, display or adoption of symbols, emblems and iconography that are at odds with Defence values”.
But any embarrassment Defence might have about the image makes sense. Crusader crosses and other medieval iconography have a long history in far-right circles. White supremacists fetishise the Middle Ages, and see the crusades as a glorious race war. For Australian soldiers to wear them while deployed in a Muslim country sends a startling message.
Widespread symbols
Roberts-Smith wasn’t the only soldier to wear crusader insignia. While Defence didn’t respond to questions about how many images they’ve doctored, the ABC’s Mark Willacy suggested “quite a few” soldiers in Afghanistan wore similar crosses on their uniforms.
The photo of Roberts-Smith dates to before 2011, suggesting the practice had been ongoing for many years. In 2018, then-army chief Angus Campbell prohibited the use of “death symbols” and other iconography on soldiers’ uniforms, including Spartan symbols and the Grim Reaper. Campbell was widely criticised for bringing “political correctness” into the military. Earlier this year, when Peter Dutton took over as Defence Minister, the calls that the army was getting “too woke” returned, with the ban on symbols again being touted as a sign of military decline.
What they mean
Campbell didn’t single out the political connotations behind the use of such symbols. But the crusader cross in particular has a dark history. The far right have always been fascinated with the crusaders and the Middle Ages. They see the period, wrongly, as a time of white racial purity in Europe. In the contemporary far-right imagination, the crusades were a righteous conflict between Islam and the West, says Deakin University medieval and whiteness studies exert Helen Young.
“Having a symbol like that in Afghanistan tells the local people that he is their enemy, that ‘I’m here fighting all Muslims’,” she said.
The connection between the far right and the crusades has been increasingly prominent during the Trump years, when the internet’s most reactionary sewers, egged on by an increasingly red-pilled Republican base, came bursting into the open. Flags and t-shirts with crusader crosses were on full display during the Capitol riots. The old crusader war cry Deus vult (“God wills it”) started popping up online, and on flags at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
“The crusader symbols have been taken up by white supremacists really substantially,” Young said.
It isn’t hard to find links between crusader symbolism and white nationalist violence. The Ku Klux Klan used medieval symbols, as did terrorists in Oslo and Christchurch. And while there’s no suggestion the ADF is full of white supremacists, Roberts-Smith’s comes with a troubling context. As far back as World War I, nationalist imagery highlighted the parallels between diggers fighting at Gallipoli, and the Crusaders “liberating” the holy land.
Beyond the crusader patch, there have been numerous “incidents” involving soldiers in Afghanistan displaying less ambiguous far-right imagery. There’s the time soldiers flew a Nazi flag over their vehicle while in Afghanistan. Or when special forces troops displayed a Confederate flag. And in that context, Roberts-Smith’s patch doesn’t feel like an isolated incident.
Notice how vigorously the right will condemn our athletes for posing at international sporting events with the aboriginal flag, yet the right/Peter Dutton will defend the right of our soldiers to wear swastikas and Crusader symbols while inflicting state-sanctioned violence on foreign soil – dismissing objections to this as somehow unacceptably “woke”. How effed up?
I am surprised the military has allowed the crusader shield to be worn for so long.It’s akin to wearing swastikas and is just as offensive to Muslims as the swastika is to Jews.
I used to play ‘cowboys and Indians’ as a kid, even then it was hard to get anyone to be an Indian. Then I grew up. Seems a lot of far-right (and some in Special Forces) have an uncertain self-image, which needs an unambiguous other as enemy. So, skin tone, what you wear on your head – all easy identifiers of ‘the enemy’. Morally bereft and intellectually shoddy.
I was always quite happy to be the Indian, as even with a beginners made bow and arrows with small rubber tip, I was always better off then someone with a cap pistol.
The war in Afghanistan was morally bereft and intellectually shoddy.
Our nation’s participation in that war is more deserving of scrutiny than the evil meaning of the Cross of St George, a symbol which is, by the way, practically universal to the apparel of English sports teams, and has probably been displayed in facepaint by 11 year old hockey fans of Pakistani heritage on many more occasions than it has ever been worn on the sleeve of any right-wing fascist special force soldier from Australia.
Without condoning any abhorrent war crime, I get the impression that, insofar as armed forces are concerned, the need for an ‘unambiguous other’ might have more to do with the unambiguous demand that soldiers kill any fellow human being that is unambiguously identified as ‘the enemy’, full in the knowledge that those fellow human beings will reciprocate by trying their utmost to kill the soldier unambiguously dead. The psychological imperative of dehumanising the enemy is universal to the military of any country throughout all of history.
It’s more important to know why our soldiers were at war in the first place. The omission of any such question is what makes this article a rabble-rousing puff piece, that is useful only for the grim humour that it may provoke by being so ludicrously oblivious of its inherent hypocrisy. What other useful purpose is served by an article demonising baddies’ on the far right, for the unforgivable sin of demonising baddies in the Middle East?
There are many unanswered questions that need to be properly investigated about the decision to enter that war, the decisions to remain in that war, and the decisions about how that war should be waged. Any honest and serious inquiry into the root causes for Australia’s war crimes in Afghanistan should place its primary focus on the political machinery that created the conditions in which they were able to occur.
If our media persisted in such an enquiry, we might have some chance of not becoming embroiled in another immoral catastrophe, and we might actually have a choice about whether the youth of our nation is to be farmed into the slaughterhouse of another major global conflict in order to sustain the share price of Daddy Warbucks & Co.
Exactly. The cross is just a distraction from the real issues, and is just a symbol of tribal allegiance in a dirty fight.
This article, like some others I have seen elsewhere, describes Ben Roberts-Smith as a “former special forces officer“. He left the army as a corporal. While corporals are NCOs (non commissioned officers) the word “officer” on its own usually refers to commissioned ranks. This is a minor point in the big scheme of things but surely it’s not too difficult for reporting about the defence force to get such details right.
Given that SAS groups are generally small, the “officer in charge” would frequently be just a corporal
Then he’d be the NCO in charge, not the OIC.
At one point his OiC was Hastie Tastie MP.
Bids of a feather flock together. Expect to hear a lot more from the panda bashers now that lazy Scott is on the ropes.
Sorry – Corporals are NOT NCOs.
I agree with the intention of your point, but in reality ADF members of corporal (and their RAN / RAAF equivalents) are not referred to as NCOs. NCOs are specifically Sergeant equivalents and up to Senior Warrant Officers, NEVER Corporals and below. Within Defence they are never known as NCOs.
You are entirely incorrect. NCOs are Lance Corporals, Corporals and Sergeants in the Army, as are their RAAF/RAN equivalents. The Navy and RAAF have one more NCO rank, which is Flight Sergeant and Chief Petty Officer respectively. The Army equivalent is Warrant Officer Class Two, which is a warrant officer rank, not an NCO rank, even though it is equivalent in the ADF chain of command. NCOs do not include warrant officers.
The more I read about this guy the more I doubt his noble intentions.
Soldiers don’t have noble intentions. They have staying alive intentions. And they are there because sent by their country, and they do as they are told. On the eve of departure they are told that God is on their side. All very confusing for the media to get right, so they don’t even try. And, does the crucifix worn by the soldier identify him as a christian, or does the beard identify him as a moslem? Perhaps the army should ban christians from fighting people of other religions? How about we only recruit budhists? WTF.
Yeah, “doing as you’re told” hasn’t been a credible defence since Nuremberg. “Staying alive intentions” doesn’t mean having to identify as a Nazi. And since when did having a beard identify you as a Moslem? More likely to be the owner of a microbrewery.
Furthermore, they are not “sent by their country”, they are sent by their government; two very different things. If our soldiers ars identifying with white supremacists, then they’re not on our side.