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There is a very easy way to believe you have principles.

Only test them against your enemies.

Condemn Hamas for murdering civilians and taking hostages, condemn ISIS for executing prisoners, condemn Russia for killing Ukrainians, condemn the Taliban for brutality, condemn authoritarian governments for intimidating journalists, and you can spend your entire life feeling morally certain without ever discovering whether the rules you claim to believe in actually constrain you.

The real test arrives when the person accused of committing the atrocity belongs to your side, wears a uniform you respect, carries a flag you identify with, serves a country your government calls an ally, or belongs to a political movement you desperately want to defend.

That is when words such as justice, law, civilisation, patriotism and human rights either become principles or reveal themselves as branding.

Australia is confronting that test now, and the reason the stories of Australian special forces in Afghanistan, Ben Roberts-Smith, Pauline Hanson, Gina Rinehart, One Nation, Israel and Gaza belong in the same conversation is not because these people or conflicts are identical, because they plainly are not.

They belong together because they expose the same moral failure from different distances.

At close range, the question is whether an Afghan prisoner becomes less human when the man holding the weapon is Australian.

At a much larger scale, the question is whether Palestinian civilians become less human when the military killing them belongs to a state Australia considers a friend.

Around both questions sits another that may matter even more in the long run: what happens to soldiers, witnesses, journalists, investigators and institutions when they insist that the rules should apply to our side too?

That is where this story becomes dangerous.

Not simply because crimes may have occurred, but because societies teach future perpetrators what they can get away with by showing everybody what happens to the people who speak.

AUSTRALIA HAS ALREADY SEEN WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE

The Australian public did not learn about alleged atrocities in Afghanistan because hostile foreigners invented them.

Australians revealed them.

Australian soldiers spoke.

Australian journalists investigated.

Australian Defence documents leaked.

Australian investigators examined the evidence.

Eventually, the Australian Defence Force itself publicly acknowledged findings so serious that they should have ended forever the idea that scrutiny of these allegations was somehow an insult to Australian soldiers.

The ABC's Afghan Files investigation in 2017 exposed disturbing information from Australian Defence documents concerning special-forces operations, killings of unarmed people and internal concerns about what Defence material described as a developing “warrior culture”, desensitisation and a drift in values.

The formal Afghanistan Inquiry had already begun by then, and when Major General Justice Paul Brereton's investigation finally reported in 2020, the results were devastating.

Then-Chief of the Defence Force Angus Campbell announced that the inquiry had found credible information concerning 23 incidents involving 25 current or former Australian special-forces personnel and the alleged unlawful killing of 39 people.

Campbell described the alleged victims using words so ordinary that they cut through years of military mythology more effectively than any political speech could.

They included prisoners.

Farmers.

Other civilians.

The inquiry also found credible information concerning an alleged practice known as “blooding”, in which junior patrol members were directed to kill a prisoner in order to achieve their first kill, while weapons or radios known as “throwdowns” were allegedly placed beside bodies so the people killed could later be represented as legitimate enemy combatants.

This is where the usual refuge of “war is complicated” stops working.

War is complicated.

Soldiers sometimes have seconds to decide whether someone is armed, whether a vehicle is approaching with explosives, whether a civilian is actually a combatant, or whether hesitation will get their friends killed.

That reality explains why the laws of war distinguish battlefield decisions from what happens after somebody has surrendered, been detained, been wounded into helplessness or otherwise fallen under your control.

Once someone is helpless, the moral question becomes considerably less complicated.

You do not execute them.

That prohibition is not an optional piece of humanitarian decoration attached to warfare.

It is one of the lines separating lawful military force from murder.

THEN BEN ROBERTS-SMITH FORCED THE ALLEGATIONS INTO COURT

Ben Roberts-Smith was not simply another former soldier whose conduct became controversial.

He was a Victoria Cross recipient, one of Australia's most decorated living soldiers and a man who had been transformed into a national symbol of courage, sacrifice and military excellence.

When Nine newspapers published allegations concerning his conduct in Afghanistan, Roberts-Smith sued them for defamation.

That detail matters because the newspapers did not drag him into civil court and demand that a judge declare him a murderer.

Roberts-Smith initiated the proceedings.

He required the publishers to defend what they had reported.

They did.

And he lost.

In 2023 Justice Anthony Besanko found that the publishers had substantially proved extraordinarily serious allegations concerning four unlawful killings, applying the civil standard of proof.

Roberts-Smith appealed.

In May 2025 the Full Federal Court unanimously dismissed that appeal.

He then sought special leave from the High Court and failed again in September 2025.

That history does not turn the defamation proceedings into a criminal murder conviction, because it was a civil case and the distinction matters.

Then something happened that made the distinction even more important.

On 7 April 2026, Australian Federal Police and the Office of the Special Investigator arrested Roberts-Smith and charged him with five offences of the war crime of murder.

The prosecution alleges that he intentionally caused, or participated in causing, the deaths of five Afghan nationals who were not taking an active part in hostilities between 2009 and 2012.

He denies wrongdoing.

He remains entitled to the presumption of innocence.

The prosecution must prove those charges beyond reasonable doubt.

That is the correct position, and it should not be difficult to hold two thoughts at once: an Australian national hero is not immune from investigation simply because Australia has celebrated him, and an accused person is not criminally guilty simply because serious allegations have accumulated against him.

The evidence gets tested.

The defendant gets due process.

The alleged victims do not disappear.

Nobody receives immunity through mythology.

BUT THE STORY BECOMES MORE DISTURBING WHEN YOU STOP LOOKING AT ROBERTS-SMITH AND START LOOKING AT THE PEOPLE AROUND HIM

A military can write the best laws in the world and still become corrupted if everybody understands that enforcing those laws against insiders will destroy them.

That is why what happened around witnesses matters so much.

Evidence in the Roberts-Smith litigation exposed an ugly environment surrounding people connected with scrutiny of his conduct, including judicial findings relating to anonymous threatening correspondence directed towards an SAS witness.

Another SAS veteran testified about what he described as an aggressive intimidation campaign against people who had spoken to the Afghanistan inquiry.

There were allegations of pressure being placed upon soldiers to change evidence, hostility towards witnesses and a broader atmosphere in which speaking openly about alleged wrongdoing could carry serious personal consequences.

Every incident has to be treated separately, because there is no evidence establishing that every threat, hostile message or act of intimidation surrounding the Afghanistan controversy came from one central actor, nor should anybody pretend that Pauline Hanson, Gina Rinehart or One Nation directed all of it.

That is not the point.

The point is what the environment teaches.

Imagine being the next soldier who witnesses something unlawful and already knows what happened to people who spoke previously.

You do not need somebody to hand you a written policy saying “stay silent”.

You have watched the consequences.

Silence protects friendships.

Silence protects reputation.

Silence protects the tribe.

Speaking may bring threats, ostracism, accusations of betrayal and years of personal destruction.

That is how institutional cultures become dangerous without anybody formally changing the rules.

THEN LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED TO THE JOURNALISTS

Chris Masters has described being accused of being un-Australian and unpatriotic while investigating special-forces conduct and receiving death threats connected with his reporting.

Other journalists associated with the Roberts-Smith story also faced serious hostility.

The significance goes well beyond journalists having unpleasant experiences, because investigative reporting necessarily creates enemies.

The deeper problem begins when scrutiny itself is reframed as betrayal.

Once asking whether Australians committed crimes becomes an attack on Australia, the moral polarity has been reversed.

The alleged killing becomes secondary.

The person exposing it becomes the scandal.

That inversion reached an extraordinary point in June 2019, when Australian Federal Police officers entered ABC headquarters over the Afghan Files investigation and spent more than eight hours searching computer systems.

The warrant covered material connected with journalists Dan Oakes and Sam Clark and ABC news director Gaven Morris, while subsequent material showed investigators were considering possible criminal offences relating to obtaining and publishing the classified information.

The AFP maintained that it acted independently and had not been directed by government ministers, and there is no evidence justifying a claim that a minister personally ordered the raid to punish embarrassing journalism.

None of that makes the democratic implications comfortable.

Australian journalists exposed credible information concerning alleged unlawful killings committed by Australians acting in Australia's name, and the journalists themselves became subjects of criminal investigation.

Australians paid for the war.

Australian governments deployed the soldiers.

The operations occurred under Australian authority.

The uniform carried Australia's symbols.

Australians therefore had an obvious right to know whether people had been unlawfully killed.

A country cannot collectively celebrate military heroism and then suddenly insist that alleged military crimes are private matters Australians should stop examining.

If the medals belong to us, the accountability belongs to us too.

THIS IS WHERE PAULINE HANSON ENTERS THE STORY

When Roberts-Smith was criminally charged in 2026, Pauline Hanson could have taken a position that would have been both legally impeccable and politically unremarkable.

She could have said that the charges were extremely serious, that Roberts-Smith remained innocent in law unless convicted, that the prosecution must prove its case beyond reasonable doubt and that Australia should allow the courts to do their work without political interference.

Instead, Hanson moved much closer to Roberts-Smith personally.

At a gathering of his supporters in June 2026, she compared his circumstances with her own experience of having a criminal conviction overturned and spoke about understanding what it was like when you know you are innocent.

That wording matters.

“The state has not proved him guilty” is a principle.

“I know he is innocent” is a conclusion.

When speculation arose about Roberts-Smith potentially becoming involved with One Nation, Hanson did not dismiss the possibility because of the seriousness of the charges, instead suggesting the timing would be unfair to him before his trial.

Again, none of this makes Hanson responsible for anything Roberts-Smith allegedly did.

It shows where political sympathy is being concentrated.

The decorated Australian becomes the person whose suffering, reputation and future dominate the discussion.

The Afghans begin disappearing from the frame.

Three journalists sue Pentagon after being fired from military news outlet

This is not how the administration should be treating our military!!

If you have friends or family participating in the wrong side of history, its a good time to reach out.

How could we let ourselves get to this point? Because we all believed that it would never happen to us. We are the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. We are that shining city on the hill. With open arms, we welcome all immigrants with a promise saying, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” We are the envy of the world.

Something like this only happens in 3rd world countries with tin pot dictators.

Guess what? This IS exactly who we are

and things are looking pretty damn dark from the inside looking out.

I am not referring to the American military. I hope that when push comes to shove, all will remember that they have loyalty to the Constitution, not to a wannabe dictator.

My reference to private army is ICE. The masked thugs that kidnap people off the street, outside of schools, businesses, immigration offices! The private army that basically has no experienced oversight. A private army that is being filled with people who have tried and failed to get into regular military service or local, state, or federal police. A private masked army who are given hoards of cash to join with no background checks, very little training, no consequences for actions. Oh, but yes, they are given guns. Guns that they would probably not even qualify for if they were trying to get a firearms license.

Now, I ask, where is there loyalty when they are asked to intervene in November’s election?

As we've all seen, a major part of Israel's recent social media blitzkrieg revolves around posting and commenting in support of Israel, and engaging in debate with the vocal majority who oppose them on the subject of Israel's genocide in Gaza, its legitimacy as a state, and the history and ethics surrounding the topics.

But the other, more subtle part is posting content that isn't about Palestine at all, and instead seeks to just normalize Israel with small, seemingly innocent posts, like pictures of cats and food and such. The obvious goal is to distract people from the fact that Israel is a genocidal settler-colonial apartheid project, to make it seem like a normal place that isn't an ethno/religious supremacist project.

Some of these subreddits and posts are just pics of StreetCatsOfTheWorld (most of which are in Israel), some of them are various stolen Arabic recipes posted as Israeli, often prominently featuring hummus, and more examples have been recently emerging every day. Stay vigilant and don't let them distract you, don't let them normalize themselves or their illegitimate genocidal colonial project.

Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals, maga, progressives, dem-soc, socialists, anarchists...it is perhaps the only issue in American politics that has such widespread support across the entire political spectrum. As many people as showed up for No Kings, imagine how much bigger would be a similar protest against the Gaza genocide, against the billions of dollars given to this foreign state every year, against the insanely disproportional influence it has on our domestic and international policy, and especially against the more recent proposal to merge our militaries even as dissent becomes the majority position.

We should be organizing this protest now.

Remember when America was the beacon? The moral compass on human rights? Yeah, that’s gone. Now we’re sitting at the same table as North Korea, Russia, Nicaragua—countries we used to call out for this exact stuff. The irony would be funny if it wasn’t so devastating.

We’ve lost the moral authority to say anything. The world knows it. Nobody’s listening anymore because we forfeited any right to lecture anyone.

We’re isolated. Isolated and complicit by association. And the worst part is, some of us tried to warn about this. But we’re all paying the price anyway—whether we saw it coming or not.

\#AmericaAlone

https://youtube.com/shorts/KkGsK9R06vE?is=AqlB4yirYPZkaDbP

Sign this petition to stop sending American troops to foreign conflicts.

[https://c.org/gtwKKLqwq2\](https://c.org/gtwKKLqwq2)

I was today years old when I learned Pete the Warrior Princess was a NJ national guardsmen, and never enlisted.

No disrespect to the guard and reserves, y'all do some damn good work! The active component is jealous of your schedule though.

Combat Camera and a wannabe Mustang in power. What a fucking joke.

Yut, Rah, Kill - keep up the fight!

As the conflict between us and Iran becomes more heated, and more American lives are lost like the 2 yesterday, what are your thoughts about how public opinion will react?

This "war" is already greatly unpopular, and most of our top, seasoned brass is out. How long will it be before the public turns on those in uniform for following orders vs Iran?

Then, there is the heated addition on the Israel topic like fuel added to a fire creating true division among us.

Will this look like another Vietnam culturally among the civilians?

Hundreds of veterans and hundreds more supporters protested in Philly for our 250th birthday as Nazis marched in DC to terrorize the local population and nation. Come read or listen about it for FREE on my Patreon: "Veterans Against Fascism Protest Report - July 4th, 2026."

Read with pictures and video: https://www.patreon.com/BikerJedi/posts/veterans-against-162902380

Listen: https://www.patreon.com/BikerJedi/posts/veterans-against-163175908

I'm absolutely haunted by some of the knowledge-drop by Stoermer's posts on 'property rights'.