Justin Raimondo links to this “home movie” made in Iraq that shows British soldiers brutally beating two teenagers. The narrator of the film cheers them on, expletives censored, whilst someone else on the recording laughs.
Chris Ryan calls them a handfull of thugs in an army of heroes.
Had Ryan been a journalist decades ago, I wonder how he would have reported the Amritsar massacre in India or The Breaking of the Mau Mau in Britain’s dirty little war in Kenya.
Pordy Laneford had come from Kenya. He sat on his hotel bed, a chinless wonder with watery blue eyes and a small moustache, and chatted about himself. He was even younger than I was. Pordy had been named after a Devonshire trout stream which ran past his family home, a bankrupt farm (as he described it) run by a military father who collected medals and taught his children about the Empire. Pordy also took up medal-collecting and Empire. He signed up with the Rhodesian police. But soon, to his surprise, he was discharged ignominiously for torturing an African suspect. He looked around for “something which was good fun and sort of helped to hold the Empire up.” In Kenya, the Mau Mau rebellion had begun, so Pordy joined the infamous Kenya Police Reserve, the paramilitary force recruited mostly from white settlers. He explained to me how important it was to kill captured suspects at once, without waiting for the “red tape” of trials and witness statements. “Killing prisoners? Well, it’s not really the same thing, is it? I mean, I’d feel an awful shit if I thought I’d been killing prisoners.”
It had been fun, he said. He went on to describe the mauve bubbles brought up by a Mau Mau suspect speared in the throat, and gave a rendering of the accompanying noises. But Mau Mau was winding down now, and Kenya was duller. What did I think of his chances of getting antiterrorist work in Cyprus? What sort of gun would they issue him? “It does feel so absolutely marvelous to have a gun, I mean you really feel you’re somebody, sort of thing.”
I had met other Pordys before, in different parts of the Empire. It was that schoolboy innocence which made them so terribly dangerous, because it was an incurable condition. They were worse, in many ways, than those compulsive sadists who emerge whenever licensed savagery is in prospect. For Pordys, torture was just a lark, a naughty sport like shooting pheasants out of season. Addicts are treatable. Fun-lovers will always hanker for more fun.
No one talks openly about these fun-lovers or admits that occupation would be impossible without them. What motivates these soldiers is clear. What isn’t so clear is why their societies are unwilling to dispense with the mock surprise and indignation when their savagery is made public and finally make a case for why they support it.