War crimes accused Ben Roberts-Smith platformed at state commemoration as Australia avoids structural reckoning with Afghanistan occupation
Original framing: “Ben Roberts-Smith attends Canberra event honouring Australian troops who served in Afghanistan” — The Guardian - World
The trickster here is the ceremony itself — a solemn ritual that inverts its own purpose. As Bakhtin's carnival logic reveals, the official commemoration becomes a 'feast of fools' when a man credibly found to have murdered prisoners stands honoured among the honoured. Roberts-Smith plays the trickster role unwittingly: his Victoria Cross (awarded for 'most conspicuous gallantry') and his civil court findings (murder, bullying, perjury) exist in the same body, exposing the medal system's inability to distinguish heroism from criminality. Hermes, god of boundaries and thieves, would note the irony: the War Memorial's boundary between 'our heroes' and 'their terrorists' collapses when the hero carries the terrorist's methods. Erasmus's 'Praise of Folly' speaks through the PM's phrase 'who we are as a people' — a people who commemorate 25 years of a lost war while prosecuting the soldier who told the truth. The absurd edge clarifies: the state honours the accused war criminal at the shrine of the fallen, and calls it healing.
The Canberra commemoration is not an anomaly but a ritualised evasion: the Australian state honours the Afghanistan occupation's 'heroism' while the Brereton Report's 39 credible unlawful killings, the prosecution of the sole whistleblower, and the absence of any Afghan voice or reparations reveal the structural architecture of impunity.
Roberts-Smith's presence — a man civilly found to have murdered prisoners, wearing a Victoria Cross at the shrine of the fallen — is the trickster's mirror showing the system's true logic: commemoration substitutes for accountability, the warrior myth protects the command structure, and the US alliance demands strategic amnesia. First Nations demands for Frontier Wars truth-telling, Afghan families' excluded grief, and the ADF's own junior soldiers' testimony of coercive culture converge on a single insight: Australia cannot honour its veterans without dishonouring its victims until it replaces ceremonial nationalism with a truth commission that has teeth, a war powers act that binds the executive, and a War Memorial that names the harmed alongside the honoured. The 25th anniversary should not be a celebration of 'who we are' but a reckoning with what we have done — and what we continue to enable.