What is it about mainstream media hacks that makes them hate the uniforms who guard them while they update their Twitter feeds? Whether it’s Hit and Run in New Zealand, or the ongoing campaign of vilification by Australia’s taxpayer-funded media, left-wing journalists never lose an opportunity to kick our armed forces – from the safety of the home front, of course.
This isn’t anything new, of course. As Orwell noted during WWII, “English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated.”
Australia’s and New Zealand’s “intelligentsia” get an ever bigger kick out of humiliating and vilifying the men and women who step up to put their lives on the line.
But if the seething hatred of the media is bad enough, the cowardice of the brass and the politicians is even worse.
On [25 August], SAS soldiers were wrapping up one of the most critical missions in their distinguished history – the rescue of more than 4000 Australians and Afghan allies from Kabul airport amid the deadly chaos of the Taliban takeover […]
But [that] Wednesday was also when the ABC’s 7.30 program chose to air a report, Inside the Drinking Culture of the SAS, to promote a new book by ABC journalist Mark Willacy.
As Kipling wrote, “We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too.” What do the ABC expect soldiers on the front line in the world’s most dangerous places to do? Hold an afternoon tea party?
Its “gotcha” moment was to play a recording of SAS soldiers, some shirtless, letting off steam at the Gratto – their private bar at the SAS base in Perth – after returning from another deployment.
They were shown singing to a song from the British group James, of which the ABC played just two lines: “Getting away with it, all messed up. That’s the living.”
Willacy’s book claims that “it’s highly probable” that the soldiers were boasting about “getting away with murder”. It was, Willacy says, “part of a dangerous moral slide that led to darker and more deviant behaviour”.
In fact, songwriter Tim Booth has said that the song, which obliquely references the musical Grease in its tale of a man who saves a woman from drowning, is about redemption. To a lot of people, it’s clearly an uplifting song.
To the SAS it celebrates fickle fate – the troubled relief to still be alive when others have died. That would resonate with every soldier who fought in Afghanistan, where 41 of our troops were killed.
Don’t just take my word for it. I’ve been copied in to a letter from an SAS soldier’s wife […] She confirms they instead sing “in remembrance of their fallen friends”.
Anyone who’s ever had anything to do with any kind of dangerous, dirty work, from military service, to police or even firefighters, or who’s known people who do, would be familiar with the fatalism, not to mention blacker-than-black humour, they use to cope.
No ABC journalist faces the danger we send the SAS to confront. None must do the violence we ask the SAS to commit, and none must carry back the bodies of their friends. None would know how they’d choose to celebrate their escape from death.
Herald-Sun
If the SAS thought the generals would have their backs, they were sadly mistaken. When unsubstantiated war crimes allegations were aired, ADF chief Angus Campbell threw his own men under the bus and cravenly “apologised to the nation”. Worse, then Defence Minister Linda Reynolds openly accused soldiers of “cold-blooded murder”.
Thankfully, Reynolds has been sidelined and replaced by a Defence Minister who “has the back” of the rank-and-file military.
Defence Minister Peter Dutton has apologised to 13 SAS soldiers accused of war crimes in the Brereton Inquiry who have now had their dismissal notices quietly withdrawn because of a lack of evidence […]
Herald-Sun
Mr Dutton stepped in to stop the 3408 members of the Special Operations Task Group who served in Afghanistan being stripped of their unit citation. The removal of the award was a key recommendation in the Brereton report.
Australia, Dutton says, should be “proud of the work” of ADF personnel in Afghanistan. But, while the Minister has apologised, the general has not.
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!
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