Ddzx is one of the few people on this list who sees the murder of a British soldier (by a lunatic) in its proper perspective.
Australia has been mindlessly tail-gaiting the British and American empires into wars (that have little to do with defending Australia) ever since Britain's wars on 'Boxers' who rebelled against British occupation of China, Britain's war on Sudanese rebels against British occupation of the Sudan, and Britain's war to cleanse Boer (Dutch) farmers from South Africa to ensure that Great Britain enslaved the Blacks and not Holland.
The AIF means Australian Imperial Forces and that means our troops did what Britain told them to do. In Britain's war to cleanse Boer (ie Dutch) farmers from South Africa, under Lord Kitchener's orders Aussie soldiers built and operated the world's first Nazi-Style Concentration Camp for the Boer women and children that had been ethnically cleansed from farming land.
In the Imperial Wars section of the Australian War Memorial is a letter from an Australian officer to his wife in which he calls what his British superiors told him to do to captured Boer women and children "a beastly business" because some 27,000 women and children died (from disease and malnutrition) in Aussie concentration camps.
In recent times, we've followed the American Empire into equally beastly wars on Vietnam, the Iraqis and the Afghans. And we support Israel's war to cleanse Palestinians and herd them into the world's biggest concentration camp: the dusty and deprived Gaza Strip.
We can't stop ourselves from behaving badly towards captured men, women and children.
We kidnap them on the high seas and like Bristol or Memphis slave-traders, we rob them of their human rights and punish them with the most feared agony in the British Colonial era: an Indefinite Prison Sentence.
And for what perverted purpose? So racism can win an election. Hence I'll be voting Green. They won't cage children in concentration camps. Rudd and Abboott will.
