A word of explanation...
Yesterday this was at the top of the lizard Oz ...
... and the pond studiously ignored it.
First it was by that lesser member of the Kelly gang, Joe, and second, already everything has changed.
If you wanted a third, you could find it in the possibly working intermittent archive ...
If you wanted a fourth, the pond would much rather be reading Susan B. Glasser ranting away in The New Yorker in The Costs of Trump's Iran-War Folly (*archive link)
If you wanted a fifth, the pond much preferred this opening flourish by David Remnick's obvious comparison in his piece Trump's Strategic and Moral Failure in Iran (*archive link)
Not many years ago, a ruthless man with an uneasy mind took power in his country and created a cult of personality. In the center of the capital, he erected a gold statue of himself that rotated with the sun. He stashed billions in a foreign bank. He closed the academy of sciences, the ballet, the philharmonic, the circus, and all provincial libraries. His autobiography became the nation’s spiritual guide. He banned dogs from the capital for their “unappealing odor.” He renamed the months: January for himself, April for his mother. He was fond of melons. The second Sunday of August became National Melon Day. Such was the world of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s leader from 1985 until his death, by cardiac arrest, in 2006. For the Turkmen people, there was nothing comical about life under his dictatorship. He barred dissent and packed his jails with prisoners of conscience. The only consolation was that he could not impose his grandiosity on the globe.
So the United States is now a banana republic and, spoiler alert, it led to a corker of a punchline ...
...In the midst of the war, Trump released plans for his Presidential library. Its centerpiece will be an auditorium with an immense gold statue of himself. Whether it will turn with the sun is not yet known.
But the pond must make some attempt at reptile offerings for keen herpetology students.
The problem was that a considerable number were obsessed with the doings of an alleged war criminal, so the pond must set the scene ...
Soon enough, the trial will begin and the pond will refrain from commenting, as it does on matters before the court, but in the interim, the pond should note that on the balance of probabilities, Ben Roberts-Smith has already been found guilty of war crimes ... in a case he brought himself.
Also on the balance of probabilities, it seems that the hive mind pack are all in on the right to commit war crimes and get away with it.
The reptiles were wildly indignant at the persecution of the "war hero", with prattling Polonius leading the way ...
The header: War hero Ben Roberts-Smith merits the presumption of innocence;A dramatic arrest, media frenzy and political restraint collide, prompting questions about due process and the presumption of innocence.
The caption for the masked marauders: Ben Roberts-Smith is escorted by AFP officers at Sydney airport following his arrest. Picture: Australian Federal Police
Question.
Why is Ben Roberts-Smith still being called a war hero by the lizards of Oz, when on the balance of probabilities, according to an Australian court, he committed war crimes, including multiple murders?
Who knows?
Shortly after 1pm on April 7, Barrett read a statement to the media that began: “A former Australian Defence Force member has today been arrested and will be charged with five counts of war crime – murder after a joint investigation between the Office of the Special Investigator and the AFP.”
Barrett added: “The former soldier was arrested at Sydney’s domestic airport this morning and is expected to face a NSW court later today.” Everyone at the media conference knew the reference was to Roberts-Smith. But the AFP was running a “no names, no pack-drill” line.
Until the lead-up to the evening TV news bulletins, that is. By then, the AFP had released film of Roberts-Smith being escorted off a plane at Sydney airport by AFP members. He had been charged with murder in the presence of his teenage children and partner. Later that day, the AFP did not prevent the media from photographing the accused sitting in a prison van, handcuffed.
It’s not the kind of behaviour that facilitates a fair trial. In The Nightly on April 8, Aaron Patrick wrote: “Mr Roberts-Smith’s lawyers offered in writing to make him available ‘at any place, at any time’ to the authorities, a source close to the former SAS corporal said.”
Obviously, the AFP wanted to put on a show.
Interviewed on Sky News’ The Bolt Report on April 9, former NSW Labor police minister Michael Costa said this was no way to treat a man who had served with distinction and had been awarded a Victoria Cross in the process.
Costa said: “He wasn’t a flight risk; he should have been phoned up and asked to attend the police station for the charging with his lawyer.” He then made a broader point that “this is happening all the time” – referring to the case of Cardinal George Pell – before adding “the list is endless”.
Ah, the Pellist ploy.
And Costa. The pond had hoped to have heard the last of him when he announced I'm leaving a failure.
The pond should note at this point the reptiles didn't offer Polonius any more visual distractions.
The pond should also point out that when it comes to snaps of the man - who on the balance of probabilities committed war crimes - the reptiles rarely feature him in all his elemental glory ... so the pond will help out.
He might not be guilty of war crimes - let the court decide - but he's certainly guilty of other crimes.
And so to a final beefy chunk of Polonial goodness ...
It was the same with The Age. Except that the article on the case written by Nine journalist Nick McKenzie had a different heading to that in the SMH. It read: “Many narcissists have tried to twist the legal system; one thing sets this man apart.” McKenzie, an activist journalist who is a long-term Roberts-Smith antagonist, alleged the former soldier had “positioned himself” above the law. How? Well, Roberts-Smith attempted “to use the civil legal system to suppress his conduct in Afghanistan” and this “revealed him as a man who thought the law his servant, a tool to bend to his will”.
No he didn’t. Roberts-Smith took a defamation case against Nine, with respect to claims made about him by Nine’s McKenzie and others, and lost. That’s all. This is not the action of a man “above the law” – whatever that might mean. In his sneering tone the journalist felt the need to refer to the VC winner “as the son of a Supreme Court judge”. What’s that got to do with it?
Having read McKenzie’s lightweight piece in the Nine newspapers, respected Melbourne Law School professor Jeremy Gans posted on X a one-word assessment – “bile”. Yet Nine editors, in their wisdom or lack of same, saw fit to publish such verbal sludge in a prominent place.
The one thing that can be said for truisms is that they are true. It is true that everyone is entitled to a fair trial. And also a presumption of innocence until found guilty, in a criminal trial, to the standard of “beyond reasonable doubt”. Roberts-Smith’s defamation case against Nine was a civil case in the Federal Court of Australia where the standard of proof is “on the balance of probabilities”.
Both Anthony Albanese and Angus Taylor responded to the news of the charges laid against Roberts-Smith with professionalism. Both have said that the matter is before the courts.
In her scripted comments, Barrett said: “The overwhelming majority of our ADF do our country proud. Today’s charges are not reflective of the majority members who serve under our Australian flag with honour, distinction and with the values of a democratic nation.” This is capable of being interpreted that a minority – of undisclosed size – do not. This overlooks the fact that of the 30,000 men and women who served in Afghanistan, two have faced charges and none has been convicted of war crimes so far.
Former senior politicians are entitled to discuss the case, as are journalists, provided they are careful with their words.
Writing in The Australian on April 8, Stephen Rice provided an excellent summary of the prosecution’s case. The analysis suggests the case against Roberts-Smith is certainly contestable.
In a statement, former prime minister Tony Abbott made this important point: “If Ben Roberts-Smith transgressed, why wasn’t this picked up prior to his gallantry awards and why wasn’t any culture of brutality towards prisoners detected by his more senior officers, and dealt with quickly, rather than being allowed to fester, as has been alleged, for over a decade?”
While stating that no man or woman is above the reach of the law, John Howard called for the trial to be held “as expeditiously as possible”. The reference is to the truism that justice delayed is justice denied.
As to the AFP’s actions, Roberts-Smith deserves the respect due to all who have been charged with criminal offences. This means not parading the accused under arrest before media outlets.
At this point the pond should pause for a break, because who doesn't love war criminals committing war crimes ...
Refreshed, the pond could turn to the Ughmann...
The header: Australia’s busted bet: the imperative for energy independence; Canberra’s escort of US minesweepers from the Gulf signalled the end of a world order Australia’s economy built upon. Its ‘busted flush’ demands urgent energy and security re-evaluation.
The caption: The USS Canberra (LCS 30) escorts the merchant vessel Seaway Hawk, laden with four decommissioned US Navy Avenger-class minesweepers, through the Arabian Gulf, on January 21, 2026. Picture: Supplied
This might seem like a step away from war crimes, but only by degree, because the Ughmann is big on war and warriors (and the pond thanks him for his seminarian service):
The wood and fibreglass vessels were beginning a long journey to a scrapyard in Philadelphia after being retired from service with the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet last year.
American minesweepers have been patrolling the waterways of the Gulf since tankers were targeted during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. But as the Cold War peace dividend was cashed in, de-mining slipped down the Pentagon’s priorities. Mine Warfare Command was dismantled in 2006 and its ageing fleet was left to atrophy in a corner of the US Navy that had no real champion.
The picture of the minesweepers’ departure, just before the shooting started in the third Gulf War, is pregnant with meaning. Most immediately, it reveals Operation Epic Fury as an epic failure of timing, judgment and strategic imagination.
Days after the war began, Iran laid mines in the Strait of Hormuz, disrupted the world’s most vital artery and sent shockwaves through the global economy. The presence of the minesweepers was testimony to the fact the US had understood this risk for 40 years. Donald Trump chose to ignore it.
No need to pause here, except to join the Ughmann in his celebration of kit, The M/V Seaway Hawk transports four decommissioned Avenger-class minesweepers, a visible legacy of a 40-year-old risk that Donald Trump chose to ignore. Picture: Supplied
So there's a sixth reason: the Ughmann is going to go over the same old tired grounds where many reptiles have trodden ...
The next day Trump’s advisers gathered without their Israeli counterparts to caution the President against the notion of a quick and clean victory. CIA director John Ratcliffe is reported to have described the regime change scenarios as farcical. Secretary of State Marco Rubio weighed in, saying, “In other words, it’s bullshit.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine warned that a major campaign against Iran would drastically deplete American weapons stockpiles. He also flagged the enormous difficulty of securing the Strait of Hormuz and the risk that Iran would attempt to block it.
Those who believe Trump enjoys a kind of secular papal infallibility will dismiss this report because of the masthead that printed it. The counter is that Swan has been remarkably good at his craft for a long time and the report rings true because the concerns raised are exactly what anyone paying even modest attention to the region, its history and its geography would have concluded.
Someone also might have added that the enduring feature of American military campaigns since Vietnam has been the difficulty of converting overwhelming tactical superiority into lasting strategic success.
Once Trump would have volunteered this view. One of the reasons so many war-weary Americans were drawn to him was his pledge to end the forever wars. In 2020 he told a group of West Point graduates it was not the job of American forces “to solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands that many people have not even heard of”.
Oh dear, not a collage ... US President Donald Trump and advisers monitor Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Picture: AFP
And yes, all that was just a prelude to the Ughmann going full isolationist, full prepper, full "get your kit ready for the bug out", full we must industrialise and do everything at home, in short, full survivalist ...
Those of us who love life are left to grapple with how best to deal with navigating the realities of this world. And earthly concerns have been rapidly reordered around the planet.
That is why there is a far deeper meaning buried in the image of ageing American minesweepers being led out of the Persian Gulf by a ship bearing the name of our capital. It speaks to something difficult to capture in words other than epoch defining.
This was a funeral procession for a world order Australia’s leaders assumed would endure. It is a photograph taken at the hinge of history, capturing not just the retirement of a class of ships but the crumbling of an empire of ideas. The old order has been discarded, largely through a wilful act of vandalism by the President of the nation that built and defended it.
Unfortunately, Australia built its modern economy on that order. That bet is now a busted flush. The only certainty from here is that the times will suit us less well. So, we need to deal with the world as it is, not as we hope it might be.
In the shadow of the US security guarantee, we built an island nation that could outsource most of the goods it needs to survive. We grew things, dug things up and sold them for export cash that crashed on to our shores in ever larger waves as commodity prices rose with the spectacular rise of China.
We slowly unlearned how to make things as manufacturing was shipped offshore. In its place we built supply chains that circled the globe and delivered cheap imports. We grew rich and became complacent as inflation fell and the job losses that come with recessions passed out of memory.
What an unhealthy seven minutes of swill, all the more ironic as its coming from a newspaper owned by Americans ...
How did that happen, how did we ship our news offshore? Cargo ships at the Port of Melbourne. Australia built an island nation on global supply chains and outsourced goods, a bet now a
As with all things Ughmann, it wouldn't be a weekend offering without a goodly, bigly dose of climate science denialism, coal worship and renewables bashing ...
We barely contemplated the idea that the world beyond our shores might not always be open, stable and benign. We organised our economy around a just-in-time delivery in a world where, one day, times were bound to turn. Which is why, when the system failed, the shock was immediate and elemental.
We are now scrounging around the world for shipments of fuel at any price. What matters now is how we respond. We need a short, medium and long-term plan for securing our energy independence. It will not be cheap or easy but the cost of not doing it could not be written more starkly and there are opportunities for a country with Australia’s deep energy endowment.
In tailoring our response, we should watch what the world is doing as it confronts the same crisis.
With a fifth of the world’s oil and gas disrupted by war, a vast hydrocarbon hole has opened in the global economy. Countries are scrambling to fill it. Governments are turning to what they can control. Thermal coal prices have climbed from around $US110 a tonne earlier this year to about $US130 to $US140, as gas disruptions in Asia force utilities to switch fuel.
Coal-fired plants that were meant to close are being kept open. Others are being run harder. Japan is increasing coal-fired generation to conserve gas. South Korea has lifted caps on coal output. India has ordered its coal fleet to run flat out. The Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Thailand are doing the same. Italy has postponed the closure of its coal-fired plants for more than a decade. Germany, once the wind and solar standard bearer and now twice mugged by the real world, is beating a strategic retreat. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned that if this crisis endures, Berlin may have to keep coal-fired power plants running longer than planned.
“We have to supply this country with electricity,” Merz said. “I am not prepared to jeopardise the core of our industry just because we have decided on phase-out plans that have become unrealistic.”
This is what happens in the hive mind, the incessant repetition, the inanely similar squawking, the relentless repetition by rote, until all the reptiles are thinking the same thoughts ... and expect their hive mind readership to join in the inane chorus Noshiro Thermal Power Station, Akita Prefecture. Japan is increasing coal-fired generation to conserve gas and ease an energy crunch, a direct consequence of the Middle East war. Picture: AFP
The pond has already been here before with the dog botherer, and how wearisome it is to be here again ...
Reiche stressed that economic growth must come before green targets.
“At the end of the day, it is good to have a goal of sustainability – but if sustainability crashes your economy, you have to readjust,” Reiche said. “And that’s what we’re doing right now.”
In Europe, the price of carbon has fallen since the war began. The system designed to penalise emissions is under pressure to release more permits and soften its constraints. The price of emitting is being lowered just as the incentive to emit is rising.
Decisions taken under stress tell you a lot. Energy security is a must-have. Cutting carbon is an adornment.
One last snap featuring coal worship ... Labourers sort coal as India’s power plants run flat out to counter Middle East war-induced energy disruptions. Soaring LPG prices are forcing families back to coal, exacerbating health and air quality concerns. Picture: AFP
And one last gobbet of more of the same ...
In bond markets, the cost of money is climbing. Governments are paying more to borrow as energy, inflation and risk are repriced together. They are also preparing to spend more to cushion the shock, pushing long-term borrowing costs higher still. The cost of keeping the system running is rising at the same time as the system itself becomes more uncertain.
Put these signals together and a pattern emerges. When the system is stressed, it behaves as built and the house hydrocarbons built still runs on coal, oil and gas.
That reality should shape Australia’s response. We should use every resource at our disposal to secure our independence in liquid fuels and all other sources of power. We should be truly energy agnostic. Coal, gas, oil, uranium, wind, solar and batteries all have a role to play and we should aim to become an energy superpower.
The Gulf states understood this decades ago. They did not just extract hydrocarbons. They built the industries that flow from them, from plastics to fertilisers, from petrochemicals to pharmaceuticals. They captured value across the entire chain.
Australia could do the same. We could power energy-intensive industries. We could host the data centres that will drive the next wave of artificial intelligence. We could secure our own future while helping to fill the hydrocarbon deficit now emerging in the global system.
That requires a shift in thinking. It requires us to see energy not as a carbon-emitting liability to be managed but as a strategic asset to be developed. The lesson from this crisis is that security is essential and energy security underpins economic and national security. No fuel, no future.
A ship bearing the name Canberra escorting the last minesweepers out of the Gulf is a snapshot of an era when the world was governed by American power and a network of alliances.
That era has passed. Now we endeavour to chart our own future or live in a world where hostile states determine it for us. We are not powerless unless we choose to ignore the power beneath our feet.
And here we are, and what can be done to Gaza can be done to the world ...
And now back to the matter of Ben Roberts-Smith.
Any number of reptiles splashed in this water, but the pond had to send a couple to the intermittent archive, so many there were ... (both intermittent archive links)
Poor bugger, Ben Roberts-Smith. The decorated soldier stands no chance.
By Noel Pearson
As Anzac Day approaches, a profound paradox haunts Australia’s war heroes: justice pursued for some, while others walk free.
By Joel Fitzgibbon
A reminder: on the balance of probabilities, Ben Roberts-Smith was found guilty of war crimes, so Noel and Joel are going out of their way to defend the right to commit war crimes ...
The pond has never been big on war crimes or war criminals, or their talk ...
This week Bolt stuck his neck out in support of the war crimes prosecution of Ben Roberts-Smith, in a marked departure from News Corp’s approach since 2018, when the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald published a series of stories alleging the Victoria Cross recipient had committed murder and other war crimes.
“I have a simple question for the people angrily defending Ben Roberts-Smith, claiming a war hero is being persecuted by woke civilians judging soldiers in battle from the comfort of their sofas,” Bolt wrote in his Herald Sun column. “Do you think Australian soldiers should be allowed to shoot unarmed prisoners?”
Reporters Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters have had to contend with multiple attacks on their journalism in News Corp pages.
In 2018 Roberts-Smith hired a PR firm and the investigative reporter Ross Coulthart as a consultant, and the Weekend Australian gave him a favourable sit-down interview, accompanied by photos of Roberts-Smith with his then wife Emma.
The former soldier claimed in a front-page story run by the national broadsheet that the stories were “demonstrably false’’.
“Nine has accused me of murder,” he said. “Frankly, it is time for their journalists to put up their evidence or admit they have none.”
As recently as May last year McKenzie was subjected to accusations on Sky News Australia that he had been “caught on secret tapes” acting unethically. Roberts-Smith’s application to reopen the appeal over the recording was rejected.
In his 2023 book Flawed Hero: Truth, Lies and War Crimes, Masters wrote: “I do not buy The Australian. It makes me sick.”
The lizard Oz makes the pond sick, but the pond doesn't buy it. Instead the pond confesses to a morbid fascination, a deep masochism, a wilful sickness.
After Joel's and Noel's attempts at FUD then comes a remarkable challenge. Could Our Henry sound more depraved than the Bolter?
Oh there's much more humbug on offer, much more of a word salad of pompous ancient references, but line him up and you could find him in the Nuremberg trials on the wrong side.
The pond discovered this because the reptiles offered a weekend special bonus Our Henry, with the hole in bucket repair man all in on war crimes and war criminals ... understandable enough when you remember that war criminal Benji is one of his heroes:
The reptiles left out any credit for that triptych and once again they muffed the chance to feature a different view, though they had these snaps in their archive ...
By golly, there are war crimes and then there are dress code violations...
On with Our Henry, and this day is rolled gold Henry, a reversion to the good old days. (Rolled gold might just be a thin coating, but who thought Our Henry was deep?)
Yes, it's peak Henry, it's fully certified Thucydides ...
To know life, he wrote, is to know that war is not just ineradicable but at times necessary – for other than the credible threat of violence, little can deter the bad from crushing the good.
And victory, he cautioned, goes only to those who are immune to “expensive hope” – mankind’s habit of “carelessly longing for what it desires, using sovereign reason to thrust aside what it does not fancy”. Prudent without being timorous, they are the few who combine an acute awareness of danger with the capacity for resolute action, instinctively performing deeds of valour when others would be frozen by doubt.
Thucydides’ reflections – shaped by both a clear-eyed sympathy for war’s victims and a genuine admiration for those who put their lives at risk on their fellow citizens’ behalf – are worth recalling as Australians consider the charges against Ben Roberts-Smith. They bring into view dilemmas as old as organised violence itself.
Some points are clear. To kill prisoners in cold blood is completely indefensible: the refusal to do so is one of the marks by which civilisation distinguishes itself from barbarism. But clarity at that margin does not resolve the harder question: how norms are to be sustained when confronting adversaries who reject them altogether.
The rules of war and a collapse into savagery
The idea that those adversaries should benefit from the protections the norms afford is a very recent one. The Greeks, for example, developed elaborate rules of war that were intended to ensure the clash of arms remained governed by reason rather than naked fury. Yet they never supposed that the restraints on the conduct of battle bound all alike.
It is therefore unsurprising that when Plato suggested, in The Laws, that Athens should apply the same constraints to wars with barbarians that applied to those with Greeks, his proposal was ridiculed as utterly naive.
There's an incredible amount of humbug at play here. After all US submariners cheerfully left Iranian sailors to die, with the full throated support of war criminal Pete Kegsbreath, and no reptile has said boo to that barbaric goose.
And by reverting to ancient times, Our Henry manages to skirt around the Nuremberg trials and the Geneva Conventions that arose from the second world war, and which were designed to stop the appalling behaviour of war criminals committing war crimes.
But apologists will always find a way to skirt the rules and find their heroes ...
Then-SAS Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith on a tour of duty in Afghanistan with the Australian Special Operations Task Group in 2010. Roberts-Smith was awarded a Victoria Cross for saving the lives of wounded comrades in battle.
The pond is quite ready to believe that Roberts-Smith will get off, on the basis of the many attempts to influence the court in his behaviour even before the trial begins, and on the basis of the many filthy rich and influential people backing his cause. and not least because the likes of Our Henry are keen to discover a keen philosophical basis for war criminality ... but no matter what, on the balance of probabilities, a court has already found him guilty of war crimes ...
The collapse, in the late 16th century, of the norms of chivalry – and the descent of warfare into savagery during the Wars of Religion – prompted a reformulation of the laws of war by Enlightenment jurists. Like their predecessors, however, they did not contend that the restraints they formulated could or should bear on conflicts with adversaries who rejected them altogether.
Thus, German philosopher Christian Wolff, who introduced the distinction between combatants and non-combatants in his 1749 treatise on the Law of Nations, emphasised that the distinction could be sustained only if the combatants on each side clearly demarcated themselves from their civilian counterparts; adversaries who didn’t were no better than pirates and deserved to be erased from the face of the Earth.
Retired Special Forces Major Heston Russell discusses the recent arrest of Ben Roberts-Smith and calls out the media for the “dramatic" way in which he was detained.
So too Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel, whose Law of Nations (1758) is often treated as a foundation of modern international law. Of those guilty of “enormous breaches of the law of nations” – such as hiding behind civilians – he wrote: “Enemies of the human race, who injure all nations by trampling underfoot the foundations of humanity’s common safety, they must be refused any quarter.”
The St Petersburg Declaration
When international lawyers began to translate the evolving norms into binding instruments – starting with the St Petersburg Declaration of 1868 – it was widely assumed, if not always stated, that they applied only within the “family of nations”: the states whose “government is sufficiently stable to undertake binding commitments under international law”, including as to the conduct of war.
But the catastrophes of the two world wars brought an immense expansion and a universalisation of the restraints the laws of war imposed. Driven in part by humanitarian impulse, in part by revulsion at the scale of the slaughter, and in part by the utopian belief that rationally constructed rules – enforced through international institutions – could tame the furies of war, increasingly stringent obligations were imposed on the deployment of armed force.
It goes without saying that Our Henry is inclined to the furies of war, and almost goes full Taliban ... Taliban fighters stand guard near the Torkham border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Nangarhar province.
But then Our Henry is devoted to Benji, as big a war criminal as can be found, up there with the mad Mullahs, so the hole in bucket man knows he must make sure to dehumanise any victims of unlawful violence ...
Reality, however, has borne no relationship to the soaring aspirations that inspired those changes. States that take the rules seriously have rarely, if ever, fought one another. Instead, their soldiers have confronted enemies prepared to use any means available in their quest for victory – including by exploiting the protections the laws of war afford. In the fog of battle, where decisions are made in an instant and often at the edge of survival, the apparent clarity of intricate rules has repeatedly proven to be illusory.
Assuming the worst of our soldiers
To make things worse, terrorists and their supporters have increasingly levelled claims of violations without any credible evidence, propagating them so as to demonise their opponents, drive them into undue caution and secure a decisive operational advantage – the reckless allegations by Hamas’s supporters against Israel being merely the latest case in point.
Just to add to the emotional balance, the reptiles threw in a snap designed to stir the hive mind ... Palestinian militants drive back to the Gaza Strip with the body of Shani Louk, a German-Israeli dual citizen, after kidnapping her from Israel’s Nova music festival on October 7, 2023.
And so to a final exhortation to allow the right to commit war crimes to continue unhindered, at least if you're supposed to be a goodie:
On one side, “progressives”, deeply hostile to the culture and ethos of the military – especially its elite units – are quick to assume the worst of our soldiers. On the other, conservatives, appalled by what they see as a collapse of loyalty and the refusal to acknowledge the burdens borne by those who fight on Australia’s behalf, are equally quick to insist that whatever our troops have done must be defended.
That polarisation has been exacerbated by the shabby treatment of the units concerned – including investigatory delays that are, in themselves, absolutely inexcusable – deepening the anger conservatives feel at the sanctimony of their opponents.
Whatever the causes of those delays, it is now reasonable to wonder whether Roberts-Smith can, after so many years and with Afghanistan firmly in the Taliban’s grip, receive a fair trial. Nonetheless, a trial there will be; and it will need to be judged on its merits, as will Roberts-Smith, taking account of the circumstances in which the alleged events occurred and the overwhelming pressures those circumstances create.
The Greeks placed their rules of war under the patronage of Athena, the goddess not of fury but of discipline. They knew, however, that the god Ares, a “bloodthirsty marauder” (as Homer called him) who haunted the field of battle, could seize the mind of even the finest warriors – as he did in propelling Achilles’ murderous instincts, Ajax’s rage and the savage outbursts of Ulysses.
That both great things and terrible things are done in combat is a fact as old as mankind. Even so, the focus there will quite properly be on this trial should not blind us to the larger truth: that the laws we expect our soldiers to obey are increasingly at odds with the grim realities of armed conflict.
Thucydides described the suffering war inflicts as “meizo e kata dacrya”: too great to be measured by tears. And as its horrors stripped away the veneer of civilised morality, even the gods were driven to weep. While retaining and preserving our values, we should ensure we do not impose more suffering on our fighting men and women than realism, reason and prudence demand.
And there you have it.
A double Thucydides bunger, with Our Henry fully down with the grim realities of armed conflict.
Murder an unarmed civilian, take off his prosthetic leg and drink from it, perhaps toasting Our Henry for his splendid philosophical insights?
Sure thing ... it's the dinkum Our Henry way ...
Altar wine lifts fragile Xian spirits, and every Xian loves a good teleportation story ... it also shows the spirits at work ...
