How Ben Roberts-Smith’s disgrace could inspire a national reckoning

The devastating fall from grace of the nation’s most decorated living soldier is a story about a war criminal, a murderer, a bully and, as the Federal Court unceremoniously concluded on Thursday, an unchecked liar.

It’s also a tale about the distorting influence wealth and privilege are liable to visit on basal democratic norms, such as the rule of law, and not least a story about unflinching media courage on a matter of the highest public interest.

There are, in this connection, few things that command greater national significance than war crimes committed in our name, particularly at the hands of a supposed war hero. For this reason, the legacy of Ben Roberts-Smith will always be bookended by disgrace, moral travesty and a betrayal that strikes at the soul of the nation.

But it’s precisely in this blended sense that his is likewise a parable about the dangers of an unvarnished nationalism that’s long masqueraded as patriotism in the form of our obscurant worship of the Anzac myth. What’s passed for public thinking about our nation’s identity in recent times, it bears emphasising, are not ideals rooted in a singular fidelity to the creed and promise of democracy that sits at the heart of our 122-year-old constitution, but conversely a romantic set of ideas about the sacrosanct white Aussie digger.

For nearly 30 years, quiet but solemn commemoration of the military has gradually been superseded by the drumbeat of a blind veneration that gifts the military immunity from public scrutiny.

If we care to be honest, any long gaze in the mirror would tell you it’s not surprising the Brereton report into alleged war crimes found evidence of a “warrior culture” within special forces, and one which had fused “military excellence with ego, entitlement and exceptionalism”. An understanding, in other words, that the usual rules of engagement don’t apply.

The same inquiry was in part prompted by the military’s internal Crompvoets report, which among other things detailed allegations that Afghan men and boys were tortured before then being shot or having their throats slit; “throwdowns”, where soldiers would cover up unlawful killings of civilians by planting weapons or radios on the corpses; and “blooding” or initiation practices, in which new soldiers were coerced into killing unarmed prisoners.

There were also claims of “sanctioned massacres”, where soldiers would shoot men, women and children running from landing helicopters. Whether all such allegations ultimately found reflection in the unredacted version of the Brereton report is unknown, but they’re nonetheless a testament to the savagery that awaits when the guardrails to prevent a descent into inhumanity dissolve in favour of a nationalist-inspired glorification of war.

What invariably manifests in such a setting, to be clear, is an immoral ideology of war devoid of limits, of conflict unspooled from the usual constraints of international law — a space in which racist symbolism, such as Roberts-Smith’s donning of the Crusader’s cross, and the SAS’ use of Nazi flags, is elevated to the natural order of things.

Indeed, it’s only in such a context that Roberts-Smith’s insistence that he “followed the rules” and “did everything that I was supposed to do” can hold any semblance of truth. As the Brereton report found, complaints from Afghan locals of conduct amounting to war crimes were, as a matter of course, dismissed as Taliban propaganda or otherwise stifled by a culture of cover-up led by several SAS patrol commanders, who were treated as demigods.

Though it’s true there have been many isolated incidences of unlawful killings at the hands of Australian soldiers in all conflicts, from the Boer War through to the First and Second World Wars, Vietnam and beyond, none approached the systemic scale of that alleged in Afghanistan.

And it’s for this reason the Afghanistan allegations should have shocked the conscience of the nation, resulting in an extended period of national reckoning. Yet conversely the opposite came to pass, at least within many rarefied and powerful circles. As one-time Liberal Party leader and then-director of the Australian War Memorial Brendan Nelson put it when first confronted by the allegations levelled against Roberts-Smith: “Where is the national interest in tearing down our national heroes?”

“What these young, highly skilled and trained men have done repeatedly over the last 15 years in intense conflict is something that is rightly the pride of the nation.”

To similar effect were Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton, who politicised the recommendations of the Brereton report by directly undermining the pledge of Defence Force chief Angus Campbell to strip special forces troops of their meritorious unit citation — a move supported by Labor. And so too Kerry Stokes, who infamously bankrolled Roberts-Smith’s defamation suit against those “scumbag journalists”, and Tony Abbott, who hung a question mark over the appropriateness of judging soldiers operating under the “fog of war” by the same standards as we would civilians.

As Guardian Australia columnist Paul Daley points out, such paeans reflect the omnipotence of a military culture cherished as core to our national identity. In the same way, they tug at the fabric of the nation by hinting at the depressing squalor that has become our civic life — a space in which anything that threatens to tarnish the Anzac myth is, by definition, unpatriotic and silenced.

Beyond this, such statements by such powerful individuals, freighted as they are with the notion that soldiers should operate with impunity, problematically lend such misconduct the faint whiff of youthful indiscretion. By inviting Australians to turn a blind eye to senseless slaughter, they dishonour not only the country but the vast majority of servicemen and women who serve our nation with dignity, loyal to the values and ethics instilled in our institutions. They also shrug off the importance of accountability in any civilised society and foster a bipartisan mentality that treats war criminals as heroes, and whistle-blowers, such as David McBride, not as patriots but traitors.

Zoom out a little and the reason for this is plain. A devout worship of our Defence Force serves those who have a vested interest in the subservient role Australia plays in its alliance with the United States. Absent such veneration, the pressure on the government to insist on some semblance of sovereignty and to resist wars of choice — such as Afghanistan and Iraq — would be acute. The paradox here, as military historian John Blaxland has noted, is that it was in part the open-ended nature of the Afghanistan mission that “made an erosion of the moral compass possible”.

Lest there be any doubt about this, look no further than the virtual bipartisan silence with which the Roberts-Smith judgment was met on Thursday evening, as well as the obvious reticence of authorities to promptly move on what are well-documented allegations of war crimes.

As of Thursday, it became a matter of public record that Roberts-Smith is a war criminal, a murderer, a bully and a liar. A man who kicked a handcuffed Afghan prisoner off a cliff before ordering a subordinate to shoot the injured prisoner dead; who gunned down a disabled man, souveniring his prosthetic leg as a drinking vessel; who bullied and assaulted his comrades; who attempted to pervert the course of justice by destroying evidence; and a man who lied under oath in the Federal Court.

But he’s also a man who could prove the bridge to a future in which we no longer tolerate the conflation of nationalism with patriotism, where we relinquish the unsound idea that ours is a nation forged in the spirit of war rather than a proud, liberal democratic tradition, and where Australians of all colours and creeds cherish our shared common spirit with First Nations peoples.

The only alternative is to forever stare into the abyss manifested by the conduct of Roberts-Smith and others, where our nation’s pride remains irrevocably wedded to the corpses of innocent civilians and the blood-stained fragments of our broken ideals.