PARTISAN!

The case of Ben Roberts-Smith exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of the liberal bourgeoisie. Edith Fischer covers the case.

Benjamin Roberts-Smith, Special Air Services Corps (SASC) officer and recipient of the Victoria Cross, was charged with war crimes on the 19th of April. This charge brings to a head a scandal that has been bubbling away beneath the surface of Australian politics for the better part of a decade, which began when journalists exposed the murders of civilians by special forces in Afghanistan. Roberts-Smith, who in many ways has come to represent the whole culture of the special forces, is the focal point of this scandal. By placing the SASC on trial, the imperialist liberal bourgeoisie has exposed its own hypocrisy.

The entire Roberts-Smith scandal is a farce, one concocted by the liberal press. With the war in Afghanistan over, and American imperialism firmly defeated, the liberal order wants to wash its hands of its crimes – and of men like those who serve in the SASC. Roberts-Smith is a problem for the liberal ruling class. He is a thug and a killer, and almost certainly a murderer. He is a paid mercenary, a man who has spent his whole life as a loyal bloodhound of the imperialist ruling class. Like the Kurtz of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he is the true face of the imperialist world order. He is the repressed unconscious, the hidden element that cannot be internalised into the symbolic system, but cannot be ejected or done away with. The revulsion of the liberals, of the Guardian reading middle classes, and of the whole ‘civilised’ world at men like Roberts-Smith is really a revulsion at themselves – a revulsion at the preconditions for their own life of smooth, effortless consumption.

Roberts-Smith argues that he committed no crime, and that he loyally served his country and its national interests in Afghanistan. On the latter point, we agree. There is nothing inconsistent or “un-Australian” about the murders that Roberts-Smith allegedly committed in Afghanistan. In fact, it was the most consistent expression of the logic of that colonial war – a bloody and pointless mess produced by the machinations of American imperialism. That Roberts-Smith is being placed on trial is odious hypocrisy. He was the man that imperialism needed to wage the war they wanted. Now they seek to throw him to the wolves.

This is not to say that Roberts-Smith should not rot in some cell. But for communists, that is certainly not enough. If Roberts-Smith is a criminal, then so too are the imperialist capitalists and politicians who took us into that war, and who caused untold bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Roberts-Smith may well be a killer, but he is merely a hired thug. It is the ruling class and their lackeys who are the real murderers.