Nobody likes a bully — unless he has a medal on. Her Majesty's well-paid
bully-boy, ready to blow to pieces any stranger his masters set him upon.
Bullies in uniform.
At least the street bully, thuggish and anti-social as he is, acts from
self-interest. Beat up that old woman — frighten that mother with kids —
scare the hell out of that kid — and they'll give you their money. The
working-class bully is a disgrace to society. But he's a disgrace created
by a system of society which rewards the most ruthless predator.
The street thug is only doing what the supermarkets do to the corner shop;
what Murdoch does to the small-fry press; what Uncle Sam does to the
neighbouring country which can't defend itself against him. I'm bigger and
tougher, says the bully, and capitalism likes a callous brute.
But the hired bullies are an even lower breed. Whereas the anti-social
mugger thinks that he can use his boots and fists to become one of the
rich kids, the wage-slave in bully's uniform is content to stay a slave,
but uses his boots and fists so that the rich kids can stay rich or get
richer. The military bully is the human fighting dog — the bulldog breed,
they call them — who will leave his wife widowed and children fatherless
to that somebody else can get rich — stay rich.
Pitiful thug, all dolled out in his Action Man kit, mud on his face to
disguise his humanity, and gun in his hand to show any brave opponent that
he will fight muscle with bullets, the soldier is one of the most
disgusting distortions of humanity that capitalism has conceived in its
perverse history.
But out of that particularly distasteful brand of state-paid bully there
is a sub-group which is even more malignant than the rest. These are the
bullies who are trained to kill strangers from the air. At least the
pathetic thugs in the army have to walk through dangerous streets
occasionally and pop their mud-stained heads up above the trenches to face
their masters' enemies. And the naval bullies have to endure months at sea
being treated like a Ship of Fools, sailing from here to there in voyages
of pointless enmity against whichever stranger the Admiral class picks for
them.
But the Air Force contains the scum of state thuggery. What could
conceivably be more uncouragously intimidating and vicious than to travel
by jet to distant lands and, from vast distances in the skies above, drop
bombs which kill people whom you have never met and whose language you
cannot speak.
We are trained to forget. So, the bombing of Afghanistan fades into the
bombing of Iraq and that fades into the Vietnamese atrocities, and who
even remembers about the villainous aerial bombing of Dresden by "the
democratic allies" in which more bowed, defeated and defenceless Germans
were killed than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (two more successful targets
for the sky terrorists)?
Blair was not alone in calling for the bully bombers to do their business
in Afghanistan, killing vast numbers of workers whose only crime was being
in the wrong place at the wrong time. Voices from the British Left
conspired with the likes of Blair to call for such aerial warfare. These
were doubtlessly the same people who had once praised "the wonderful
Soviet Air Force" whose planes were poised to fly over Britain and kill
thousands of workers here with the press of a button.
The bomber from the skies does not select victims on the basis of any kind
of justice, however misplaced. Aerial bombing is indiscriminate in its
slaughter. In Kabul the USAF and the RAF killed children as they played.
This was murder with precision accuracy, carried out with the blessing of
Church and State, and with the killers given medals upon the completion of
their sick deeds.
And when they return, these uniformed murderers, they have children whom
they love and care for, and dogs which they take to the vet when they
limp, and they give money to charities because they feel sorry for
neglected whales or crippled war veterans. In short, they are bullies by
profession, not by birth.
Their sick behaviour takes arduous training to develop. One day they are
spotty teenagers, standing in the dole queue and wishing they could make a
living wage out of doing something decent. And then the wages of military
indecency are offered to them and off they go to train to kill.
Look carefully next time you pass an RAF Careers Office. They are
buildings which humans shall one day be ashamed to remember.
They are bastions of the inhumanity which the profit system needs, like a
vampire needs blood.
Jt
www.worldsocialism.org
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