A-Infos (en) Australia, AnComFed, Picket Line - Ben Roberts-Smith: The Rot Comes from the Top (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Australia's most decorated soldier Ben Roberts-Smith was recently 
arrested in connection to war crimes in the Afghan War. ---- 
Conservative media is clearly relishing the opportunity to turn this 
trial into a culture war issue, with "real Aussie patriots" supporting 
Roberts-Smith and "terrorist sympathising lefties" against him. 
Right-wing militarists, like Pauline Hanson, demand that the prosecution 
of Roberts-Smith should end. Not so much because they think he's 
'innocent', but because they believe civilians have no right to judge 
the military. They believe that soldiers should be able to commit war 
crimes with impunity. The right-wingers who push for this are backed by 
major Australian capitalists like Gina Rinehart, John Singleton and 
Kerry Stokes-the Channel 7 billionaire who bankrolled Roberts-Smith's 
initial disastrous defamation case.

But there's a bit more to their spin. One conservative line that carries 
some truth goes something like "The government cannot send a man into 
war and be shocked at the consequences".

Firstly, Roberts-Smith is charged with the killing of detained, unarmed 
men. He has personal responsibility for his crimes.

But it is hypocritical for a government to declare an unjust war, train 
people to be killers, and arrest soldiers when the inevitable happens. 
There's no arrest warrants for the politicians in charge, who are 
responsible for far more deaths.. There's no trial for the corporations 
who lined their pockets throughout the war.

The Australian state boasts that its war crimes investigations go beyond 
looking at a few bad apples, to looking at systemic issues. The Labor 
and Liberal parties support this kind of thing because they think it's 
necessary to protect the reputation of Australia's military. That was 
the motivation behind the 2020 Brereton Report into war crimes committed 
by the ADF during the Afghanistan war.

The truth is that imperialist war is always unjust and inherently 
produces people like Roberts-Smith. When a foreign power aims to 
overthrow a local government, innocents are always targeted. People are 
murdered, driven from their home, sexually assaulted and robbed. Whether 
the imperialists admit it or not, these crimes are accepted tools of 
imperialist war: the point is to beat people hard enough, so that they 
agree to the demands of the invading power.

The invasion of Afghanistan was criminal. But more importantly, it was 
unjust, and fought only in the interests of the ruling class. Had the 
United Nations approved every bomb dropped, and every bullet fired, we 
would still have opposed sending Australian workers to terrorise 
innocent Afghans.

The arrest of Ben Roberts-Smith will be no justice for the people of 
Afghanistan, even if he were to share a cell with George W. Bush, John 
Howard, Barack Obama, and all the other imperialist leaders. Arrests 
won't stop war crimes, because it is an entire system that is guilty.

A day after Roberts-Smith's arrest, Trump threatened Iran by declaring 
that 'a whole civilization will die tonight'. The arrest and trial of 
Roberts-Smith is small fry. The real struggle is against imperialism, 
and the capitalist system that generates it.

To put a stop to imperialism, we have to take the fight to the ruling 
class. That starts by building power in our workplaces. Without workers, 
nothing in society functions-including war. Peace is union business, and 
industrial action is our best weapon. From there, we must make 
connections with fellow workers across the globe. Together, from 
Afghanistan and Iran, to the United States and Australia, our class can 
put a stop to war.

We have a world to win. And only in that new world-one without bosses or 
politicians-will we be free of the likes of Ben Roberts-Smith.

For more on imperialism read our feature from the latest issue of Picket 
Line https://ancomfed.org/2026/04/imperialism-is-not-history/

https://ancomfed.org/2026/04/ben-roberts-smith-the-rot-comes-from-the-top/
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