A group of current and former Australian soldiers are allegedly running a public Instagram account that mocks allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan, celebrating brutal acts of violence and sharing distressing footage of combat killings to its 8,300-plus followers.
The account, titled State Sanctioned Violence, pledges to “[keep] the legacy of the boys we lost alive”, and is mostly made up of biographies of Australian servicemen—both dead and alive—as well as quasi-motivational quote cards and videos from the frontlines.
“I have two command priorities this year: proxy wars and smashing whores,” reads one post, a quote attributed to the Commanding Officer of the Special Air Service Regiment. “Men don’t have feelings, they have muscles,” reads another. Several posts advertise merchandise stickers sporting the slogan “Make Diggers violent again,” while the account’s bio celebrates “battalions”, “bayoneting” and “beers”.
“Digger” is slang for an Australian or New Zealander soldier.
It’s within the image captions, however, that some of the more disturbing content is found. A number of posts repeatedly compare Taliban soldiers to “meat”. One jokes about using the skin of dead adversaries as lampshades, and another makes a quip about an Australian soldier filling his drink bottle with the tears of Afghani widows whose husbands “he had just cut down with his M4”. The caption to an image of a soldier who fought in Vietnam tells of how he “ejaculated in a VC's bullet wound”.
Many of the posts have garnered hundreds of likes.
A source reportedly told the ABC that the account is primarily operated by one former and one serving special forces soldier, with much of the content being supplied by former and serving special forces personnel. The ABC was also told that the tone and content of material uploaded to the account has raised concerns among the Australian Defence Force’s (ADF) higher-ranking officials—although Defence claimed it was "not aware of any connection" between currently serving soldiers and the State Sanctioned Violence page.
"If Defence personnel are identified as having posted inappropriate material, they will be investigated and held accountable for contravening Defence policy,” the Defence Force said.
The tone of the posts has also raised concerns about toxic and potentially extremist ideologies being seeded throughout the rank and file of the ADF, with many of the image captions echoing the kind of language typically associated with the militant far right.
John Coyne from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), who’s spent decades investigating links between the military and the far-right, told the ABC that while the content seen on the Instagram account doesn’t necessarily reflect extremist tendencies, it is cause for concern.
"You've got some allegedly ex-members of the ADF saying some pretty horrendous things about violence etc, and you would argue that those people are susceptible to being radicalised themselves, if they haven't already been so, to a more right-wing extremist perspective,” he said. "I think that is a concern both for Defence and for the wider public."
On Thursday afternoon, the State Sanctioned Violence account posted a story to Instagram claiming that personnel associated with the page had been encouraged to unfollow it and distance themselves in the wake of ABC’s coverage, alongside laugh-crying emojis. The account was taken down less than an hour later.
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