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Penny Red wrote a really interesting post about Torchwood, which is something I want to talk about in another post, but what really jumped out at me from her post was:
Because a British state ready to abandon its own people to pain, loss and hardship is not science fiction. It's happening right now, today. In the 20th century alone, the government sacrificed not 335,000 but millions and millions of its own citizens, mostly boys, some barely more than children, when faced with an enemy armed only with machine guns and lots of mud.
This is something i think about a lot, I am not a fan of the military at all, I don’t think we should have a military, I am mostly pacifist but I do get absolutely furious about the way we treat our troops and ex troops. I was so angry that the Ghurkhas had to fight so hard for British citizenship when they had fought for Britain and recently there was a nationwide charity drive to raise money to build a rehabilitation centre for injured soldiers and that made me really angry, not because people were raising money but because they shouldn’t have had to be. Why in the hell wasn't the government paying for it?
I strongly believe that if people join the army, if someone signs up to risk their life for their government then their government damn well provides them with citizenship, housing, healthcare and education for ever
Also something that pissed me of in a month where lots of British soldiers died in Afghanistan was the disproportionate amount of news coverage given to one solider because he was a lieutenant colonel, and many of the news reports felt the need to tell us that he was the highest ranking officer to be killed since the Falkland’s without examining the class politics of that. I don't know how it works elsewhere in the world but in the uk the army officers are overwhelmingly middle to uperclass and have middle to upper class educations and clearly they don't get put in the frontline, because working class solders are the ones who are used for cannon fodder.
Because a British state ready to abandon its own people to pain, loss and hardship is not science fiction. It's happening right now, today. In the 20th century alone, the government sacrificed not 335,000 but millions and millions of its own citizens, mostly boys, some barely more than children, when faced with an enemy armed only with machine guns and lots of mud.
This is something i think about a lot, I am not a fan of the military at all, I don’t think we should have a military, I am mostly pacifist but I do get absolutely furious about the way we treat our troops and ex troops. I was so angry that the Ghurkhas had to fight so hard for British citizenship when they had fought for Britain and recently there was a nationwide charity drive to raise money to build a rehabilitation centre for injured soldiers and that made me really angry, not because people were raising money but because they shouldn’t have had to be. Why in the hell wasn't the government paying for it?
I strongly believe that if people join the army, if someone signs up to risk their life for their government then their government damn well provides them with citizenship, housing, healthcare and education for ever
Also something that pissed me of in a month where lots of British soldiers died in Afghanistan was the disproportionate amount of news coverage given to one solider because he was a lieutenant colonel, and many of the news reports felt the need to tell us that he was the highest ranking officer to be killed since the Falkland’s without examining the class politics of that. I don't know how it works elsewhere in the world but in the uk the army officers are overwhelmingly middle to uperclass and have middle to upper class educations and clearly they don't get put in the frontline, because working class solders are the ones who are used for cannon fodder.
