Evening news heroes
Not respecting ’our’ troops is one of the biggest taboos in politics. Armed Forces Day is a most bizarre invention, plucked from the ether by politicians to justify support for various overseas expeditions and to placate the military establishment.
The cult of military heroism in Britain is absolutely bizarre. It has created a climate in which everyone is a hero, even those people who have ambivalently signed up to the military due to a lack of options at home for reasons of class, education or general unemployment.
A few years ago the Army started recruiting via Spotify, running adverts that began with a supermarket checkout beep and contrasted the low-paid monotony of Tesco jobs and dead end college courses with the excitement of sitting on top of a tank with your mates carrying guns. This whole recruitment ethos was lampooned in Gary: Tank Commander and the central character’s bemused reaction to being hailed a hero on his return to Glasgow Airport.
The other odd thing is that we already have a day set aside each year to remember all those lost to war and conflict, though of late Remembrance Day has been appropriated by the jingoistic people who emphasise the Great in Great Britain and turned into a celebration of war which makes it uncomfortable for anyone not into military cheerleading.
Armed Forces day in Scotland is also a chance for the unreconstructed Union Jack wavers to have a day out and assert some sort of made up connection between Scotland and military expeditions – the recent article in the Scotsman by Major General Andrew Mackay in which Scots were described as ‘a warrior race’ being a case in point. Since the referendum has been on the radar this also plays in to a particularly nasty kind of militaristic British nationalism, typified by the appallingly small-minded rhetoric of ForcesTogether and its attempts to construct the United Kingdom as some sort of military brotherhood. Not by coincidence, the report which General Mackay authored was commissioned by a private think tank, the Scotland institute, set up and funded by a multi-millionaire former Territorial Army member.
I’ll respect our troops for the people they are, and I’ll remember the kid I went to primary school with killed by a roadside bomb in Basra, and I’ll support the member of my extended family who went into the RAF after being repeatedly failed by the school system, but I will not do it on Armed Forces Day.
#1 by Jack Farquharson on June 30, 2013 - 1:17 am
Nice article. However, going by hourly rates Tesco’s pays much, much better than the army does (the adverts were mostly spin – shock!). I have worked for both – once you get up the ranks/been in a few years this is not the case, but for most privates they would get paid more doing the same amount of hours in Tesco .
#2 by Abulhaq on June 30, 2013 - 11:37 am
The British state and the military have a symbiotic relationship. We should not be surprised that the system is giving the army a higher “patriotic” profile as the referendum approaches. What is disturbing is that fringe groups Ukip, Edl, Orange order etc are joining in with this Britfest. The public, in England at least, seem to have absorbed the lie that the army is protecting the nation from forces, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya etc, that seek to destroy it. The violent activities of certain ultra-Islamists seems to add weight to the notion. For a state that does rather exaggerate its rôle in pioneering democratic government this trend simply confirms a return to basics. Those ruritanian uniformed royals really know what’s what and so should we by having none of it.