On May 15th, CCTV reported that retired British soldiers collectively exposed war crimes. More than thirty soldiers who served in the British special forces broke their silence, openly pointing out that during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the British army massacred unarmed civilians, including children. They recalled that they never even took a wounded prisoner back to the base for treatment, and executing prisoners on the spot had become routine. The veterans stated that they once handcuffed a young boy and then shot him dead, even though the boy was just a child and not of fighting age.
The British special forces are merely a butcher’s knife of imperialist expansion in the colonies, a violent tool to safeguard the interests of the monopoly bourgeoisie. The lives of the Iraqi and Afghan people were treated as targets in a killing contest; in the eyes of these killing machines, nothing has value. Burning, killing, looting, and wanton slaughter are no different from the actions of the Eight-Nation Alliance and the Japanese invaders a hundred years ago.
CCTV’s interpretation of this incident is also quite absurd. The report attempts throughout to understand these executioners’ crimes through “psychological trauma” and “ethical confusion,” blaming the slaughter on “lack of supervision” and “cultural isolation.” It’s as if holding a few hearings and setting up some supervisory posts could make murderers repent. More ironically, while criticizing “Western armies for being unsupervised,” CCTV deliberately forgets that its own so-called “People’s Army” is also executing even more brutal fascist orders.
It is precisely in China that this absolute obedience, inhumane military system is revered as “iron discipline”; it is in China that suppressing crowds and clearing streets are packaged as “stability maintenance.” Now, the Chinese revisionists have suddenly transformed and taken on the role of “justice messengers,” pontificating about foreign atrocities—truly disgusting. Who used tanks to crush civilians in 1989, and who sent the most peacekeeping troops, acting as “world police dogs” barking everywhere?
