It said that around 24,000 veterans are either in jail, on parole or serving community punishment orders after having been convicted of crimes. They make up around nine per cent of the prison population.That's a not-insignificant percentage, no matter how you slice it. I wonder what the root causes are? Contrary to post-Vietnam Hollywood images, returned vets tend to be, on average, more squared away than the general populace.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
A corps in the field and another in jail...
A veterans' issue in the UK:
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11 comments:
I have a theory.
Veterans are less likely to put up with shit from these little teenaged assholes running around England, and get popped into the slammer for slapping the christ out of some punkass.
Right on target, Ahab.
Thanks to Tom Kratman, I learned that Germany has a delightful law prohibiting service members from wearing their dress uniforms in public. It seems the sight may cause emotional distress to a significant portion of the Fatherland's population.
We think that we have an obnoxious hippy problem here in the US, but our problems are nothing compared to the Watermelon Movement (green on the outside, red on the inside) in Western Europe.
Let's hear it for the Tranzi (transnational socialist) progressives!
Thanks for the linkage, Tam! Much appreciated!
Bob
Maybe they were bitter and tried to cling to their guns.
The Left is really in charge in England, and they still have their class warfare and they never have loved their veterans until the whole nation is at war (WWI & WWII) Kipling had something to say about it for the survivors of "The Last of the Light Brigade".
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/357.html
of course "Tommy" says the rest of it http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/tommy.html
"We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;"
I know that five or six years ago it was so difficult to get recruits that the RN was going directly into prisons- juvenile and adult- to seek volunteers.
Not a new thing by any means, except for the seek (as opposed to order) volunteers, but still.
I agree with Ahab...in today's England, any veteran/citizen that stands up to brats on the street or defends him/herself, is likely to wind up in jail. This is what happens when those who pass laws don't have to live under them (I suspect most MPs have bodyguards).
Joseph said:
"This is what happens when those who pass laws don't have to live under them (I suspect most MPs have bodyguards)."
Indeed they do; they're called the Police.
As recent events in Denver linked to by this site illustrate, that's what can be expected when the police are required to operate outside of their intended function as criminal investigators (arresting suspects being basicly they're final contribution to the investigatory process).
The specific case in point from Ol' Blighty illustrates yet another result of strong centralised government: personal self-reliance and liberty is regarded as a threat to enforcement of societal standards of "good order". As Tam noted, veterans tend to greater personal competence, on average, then is the societal norm. Alternative competence is always seen as a direct threat/challenge to those who's task is made to include preemptively imposing societal control upon others.
Any society ... including the USA.
Since most cops are also military veterans, the Denver cops also illustrate just how veterans tend to differ from the accepted standards of expressing societal norms (and here in the US, I submit that the 1st Ammendment is the US societal norm).
Presuming English .mil vets haven't changed all that much from when I last had regular contact with same, it's really not too surprising to learn so many of them have come acroppers with the coppers, as it were.
I agree with both Ahab and Will Brown. When daughter #1 was in England, she was forced to attend a class in not defending herself, more or less mandatory for visiting American, Israeli, and Irish students.
Presumably, everyone else already knew how to cower, cringe, and beg like an Englishman.
The rationalization was that if two people were struggling, the police wouldn't know which to blow their whistles at.
I can see how someone from one of Britain's fine old county regiments would have a difficult time adjusting to the craven civil world.
Remember, these people enlist for a specific regiment, are much more likely to go career than Americans, and are often 3rd, 4th, or 5th generation in the same unit.
Britain's regimental culture is virtually a seperate world, for soldiers and their dependents. The two cultures couldn't be more diametrically opposite.
What's this about soldiers and "Do Not Walk On The Grass" signs?
I remember reading (Yeah ... yeah ... we had newspaper in Canada back in the day.) about returning troops from Viet Nam. There were horror predictions about the US being overrun with 100s of thousands ... well, okay ... tens of ... well maybe thousands ... okay 100s) of heroin addicted vets who would have shoot-to-kill tendencies.
Didn't happen. At all!
I also spent time with vets who had retired to the mountains of New Hampshire. The other comments about the Brit vets made me think of them. My friends were certainly independent thinkers ... and the more remote mountains and small towns allowed the freedom to live their own way. But ... none of them would put up with any BS. And, as they often clanked when they walked, the local young troublemakers soon learned to steer around those of us of a certain age and look.
Still ... I weep for the Great Britain that was.
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