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Warring with conscience

A personal statement from a former soldier who has become a socialist.

I got angry again yesterday – I mean deep in the gut angry and it disturbs me a great deal for several very good reasons, not least is that so much adrenaline pumping around my system is shortening my life. First though, I need to explain that the reason I was angry was because of some of the content of a book – Howard Zinn’s A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. It isn’t important for you to know exactly what angered me. I get angry and emotional a lot these days now that I have the time and inclination to learn, to dig out the truths buried beneath the lies and the propaganda and the “bullshit” on which I fed for so much of my life.

I was a soldier you see, a professional, a volunteer and I served in the Parachute Regiment, “The Maroon Machine” or “The Mob” as we liked to call it; I was proud then and I still can’t totally suppress that (misplaced) sense of pride that goes with being a member of such an elite organisation. When I took the ‘Queen’s Shilling’ I swore to serve Our Sovereign Lady but that changed pretty quickly once I finished training and joined my battalion. Here there was a different ethos; here we were family, here we looked after each other, we soldiered for the “buzz” of adrenaline, for our wages and for our mates, our loyalty was always to each other and our Airborne Family, it was certainly not for “Queen and Country”. Together we did whatever the government tasked us to do because we were professionals and we had a “contract”.

Any risk to life and limb was an accepted part of the deal – no regrets. There was no moral dimension to this, although in certain theatres of operation I remember feeling that we were doing the right thing in making an orderly transition from colonialism to independence possible. The fact that the “natives” thought we should never have been there in the first place and were actively resisting us and the imposition of our ideas of democracy on their (usually) tribal societies was of little import and actually added some spice to our lives – wasn’t this what we joined up for, a bit of excitement, a bit of a rumble? Shameful as it is to me now, all you have to do to cope easily without any niggling doubts is dehumanize the ‘enemy’, give them tags like ‘Argy’, ‘Rag-head’, or ‘Nig-nog’ and they could be ‘wasted’ without conscience. Just so much rubbish to leave behind for their own to clear up. In this the media is always complicit – just think back to the jingoistic headlines in the build up to and during the Falklands “Campaign”.

When questions were raised the “Brass” would assert that racist attitudes were not tolerated in our Army. But for us “Toms” the object of the exercise was always to go in hard and aggressive, get the job done and then get out together with our mates, our ’clan’ and ideally, all in one piece. If a bit of racial profiling helped to get us “jacked up” so much the better. Over a beer some might admit to a grudging respect for the ‘raggies’ much in the mould of Kipling and his “Fuzzy-Wuzzy” but care was taken not to let this cartoon image take on too human a form, after all, we had to go back to work again tomorrow, didn’t we?

In case you think you’re safe in the UK from this kind of attitude from “our boys” let me assure you you’re not. My partner and I have been together for many a year – she has been an instinctive Socialist all of her life, active on picket lines and protests and we both know that in those days I’d have cracked her head as easily as I would have any other Bolshy pacifist and not suffered the slightest twinge. How easily an ordinary, generally well balanced young man can be conditioned and “guided” to become a very sharp tool of the establishment; in reality a controllable psychopath. I doubt that anything has changed in the modern British Army - apart from the improvements of weapons and tactics.

Maturity can bring many benefits; in my case it was a blossoming of inquisitiveness, a recognition of the other person’s humanity, and a tadge more tolerance which seemed to be associated with a reduction in testosterone. Traits that had been suppressed began to surface – I found that I detested racism and sexism, that unfairness and injustice towards my fellow human beings had me on my feet and getting active and the inhumanity of the Global Capitalist System enraged me. I still hadn’t made the connect between socialism and my gut feelings, for me socialism was Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Trotskyites - socialism was just the other side of the same old fascist coin. There didn’t seem to be any organised groups of people who felt as I did.

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