In July this year, it was reported that Lieutenant William Calley Jr, the American soldier convicted of leading and carrying out the My Lai massacre in 1968, had died at the age of 80. He passed away while in hospice care in Florida back in April.

Calley led his soldiers, of Charlie Company, in March 1968 into My Lai village, as part of the American war in Vietnam. Initially informed that there were Viet Cong guerrillas in the area, Calley and his men found none.

Herding the Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, into ditches, the mass killing began. Elderly people were bayoneted, unresisting villagers were herded into huts and firebombed with hand grenades. Women and girls were gang raped. In all, 504 Vietnamese were slaughtered. There were no American casualties.

The massacre was initially covered up by the military authorities. It took the persistent efforts of witnesses, brave US soldiers such as Ron Ridenhour and Hugh Thompson Jr, and a then-young intrepid reporter Seymour Hersh, to bring this horrific massacre to light.

An investigation into the My Lai massacre was launched by the US military, eventually, where witnesses described the atrocities committed in nauseating detail. Calley was the only American soldier convicted of the crime, in 1971. His sentence was subsequently reduced by successive US administrations, and he was placed under house arrest. Charges against every other soldier who participated in the gruesome massacre were dropped.

Sentenced to life imprisonment, Calley was in jail a total of three days, before being placed under house arrest on the orders of then president Richard Nixon. Living on the base where he had been trained, Fort Benning, Georgia, Calley’s sentence was reduced to 10 years in 1974.

Fort Benning, named after a Confederate general, was renamed Fort Moore in 2023.

Calley was pardoned and released in 1975. Numerous pro-war politicians, both Democrat and Republican, waged a political campaign for Calley’s release, claiming that his conviction and sentencing were too harsh. Rehabilitating Calley’s actions was a particular initiative in rehabilitating the American war on Vietnam. The war itself was presented as something noble and righteous, blighted only by the unfortunate actions of overzealous patriotic soldiers like Calley.

Whenever a case like this comes to the attention of the international public, there are demands that international laws and conventions governing the conduct of warring parties be followed. For instance, if American soldiers were captured by the enemy (whether Vietnamese or other nationalities is unimportant) surely Washington would loudly demand that their compatriots be treated with respect and dignity?

There has been a multitude of books and documentary materials relating to the Americans held captive by North Vietnamese forces. Actually, there were no POWs left over after the Vietnam war finished in 1975, but that did not stop Washington from making the mythical POW/MIA an international cause célèbre for decades.

In fact, during World War Two, there was an infamous case of American POWs, after surrendering, were mercilessly gunned down along with cooperating Belgian civilians. The Malmedy massacre, as the incident is known, occurred in December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, a major military engagement in Western Europe.

After a brief battle, surrendering American military personnel were killed by the Waffen SS. The German officers responsible for the actual killing, and those who gave the orders to kill POWs, were tried as war criminals in 1946.

Not only were the German soldiers who carried out the killings imprisoned, but also the commanding officers Sepp Dietrich and Joachim Peiper. This was the time of the Cold War, and West Germany formed an indispensable ally in Europe of the Americans. The West German government, though nominally committed to denazification, overlooked the wartime crimes of ex-Nazi officers. The latter infested the armed forces, police and legal apparatus of the West German state.

Dietrich and Peiper, though found guilty of the Malmedy massacre and imprisoned, walked out of gaol free men in the 1950s. These men, and their former Waffen SS colleagues, formed an organisation dedicated to rehabilitating the reputation of Nazi Germany and the wartime SS. American military veterans’ organisations strongly protested the release of Peiper and his associates.

There was a measure of justice in the end. Joachim Peiper lived quietly in France after his release. In 1976, his true identity was discovered – his house was firebombed, and Peiper perished in the flames. His assailants have never been found.

While Calley faced the consequences of his actions, the military and intelligence personnel who designed and rationalised the Vietnam War never faced any accountability. Who among us knows the name Wesley Fishel? A Michigan State University political science professor, he was active in military intelligence and the CIA.

An advisor to the American installed Saigon South Vietnamese regime, he worked closely with Ngo Dinh Diem, Saigon’s American subsidised satrap. Running a vicious dictatorship takes hard work, and Diem was ably assisted by Fishel in this regard. Diem’s secret police, trained and equipped by the United States, formed a feared prop of the Saigon dictatorship.

Fishel designed and advocated the concept of strategic hamlets, forcing Vietnamese villagers into designed camps, demolishing their homes and killing their livestock. The underlying rationale was to deprive the National Liberation Front of recruits. Political loyalties were closely monitored, and the large Buddhist community was targeted by Diem forces.

Fishel himself lived the secluded and luxurious life of a proconsul, keeping his distance from the natives he was supposedly protecting from communism. Indeed, South Vietnam was an American sponsored plutocratic dictatorship, a totalitarian entity that was precisely what they claimed to be fighting against in their communist adversary.

After the war, Fishel returned to the United States, and continued his academic career. His top boss, former Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, took up the presidency of the World Bank.

It is high time that those who give the orders, seated behind desks and computers, face the consequences for making the decisions which lead directly to heavy loss of life and ecological damage.

James Bond, in his Pierce Brosnan phase, was a refugee supporter. At least, that is what we are led to believe from the character’s statements and actions in the 1995 movie GoldenEye.

Bond expresses the opinion that the forcible repatriation of Cossacks by the British government in 1945 from Allied-occupied Austria to the Soviet Union was a source of shame. The main villain of the film, played by Sean Bean, is the son of one of the repatriated Cossacks, who exacts revenge on the government that supposedly ‘betrayed’ his father, sending him to certain death in the USSR.

That makes for a fantastic movie scenario, full of action, crime and death-defying stunts.

The return of the Cossacks by the British government at the time has turned into a minor albeit important cause célèbre in Tory and conservative circles. Authors such as Nikolai Tolstoy, ultrarightist enthusiast, whose anti-Sovietism is something of an obsessive crusade, wrote books about the ‘betrayal’ of the Cossack soldiers. Remaking himself as a ‘revisionist historian’, his exercises in revisionism somehow always correspond to an ultranationalist reinterpretation of the events and outcomes of World War 2.

Ever willing to provide more grist to the mill of Britain’s paranoid Russophobia (complemented by Sovietphobia), Britain’s conservatives have turned the fate of the Lienz Cossacks into a historical epic, shrouded in a hypocritical ‘self-criticism’. Naughty us, we should not have done that.

There is just one problem with this narrative; the Cossacks who were forcibly repatriated by the British, under the terms of the Yalta agreement, were Nazi collaborators, ultranationalist extremists and war criminals. Formed as auxiliary units of the Wehrmacht and SS, the Cossacks were deployed by the Nazi authorities to combat the Yugoslav partisans, anti-guerrilla operations, and suppress the famed Warsaw Uprising.

Fighting for the Nazis, and maintaining ultranationalist views, is perfectly okay for the imperialist states, if you are an immigrant foot soldier for regime change.

The Cossacks are an East Slavic subset of the Russian-Ukrainian polity. Their history is complex, but they derive from the feudal-era conflicts and principalities in Eastern Europe and Ukraine. A semi-nomadic people, their name derives from the Turkic qazaq, meaning ‘adventurer’, though that is disputed by some historians.

Occupying the vast grassland steppe regions of the Don, Terek and Kuban regions of Russia and Ukraine, they are known for their distinctive fur hats, squat dance, and horseback skills. While they led numerous armed rebellions against the Tsar, the Cossacks became a feared paramilitary force, enforcing the laws of Holy Mother Russia with the whip and cudgel.

Employed as strike-breakers, the Cossack formations in the Tsarist Russian army were fiercely patriotic, espousing a virulent antisemitic Greater Russian nationalism, coupled with ferocious loyalty to the Orthodox Church. After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Cossacks fought both for and against the Communist regime.

Numerous anticommunist Cossacks, maintaining their ultranationalist Russian nationalism, escaped to the West. The enforced collectivisation of Cossack lands in the 1930s, and the official de-Cossackisation policy, brought its own problems. Nevertheless, Cossacks joined the Soviet army and fought for the Bolsheviks in World War 2. Cossack units still march in the annual Victory Day parade in Moscow.

The monumental Soviet novel And Quiet Flows the Don, published in the 1930s, is an epic novelisation of the Don Cossacks and the impact of collectivisation. Its author, Mikhail Sholokov, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1965.

Cossack identity re-emerged in the wake of Gorbachev’s perestroika, and by the early 2000s, Russian President Vladimir Putin accepted the Cossacks as a necessary prop for the Russian state. The ultranationalist outlook of the Cossacks found a corresponding home in the perspective of the Kremlin.

The rightwing Cossacks, having sought regime change during the years of Communist rule, have made their peace with the Putin administration. It is important to note that point, because there was a rather interesting article in Inside Story, denouncing the Cossack and Russian community in Australia for being a pro-Putin fifth column.

Denouncing the socially regressive and ultrarightist perspective of the Australian Cossacks and their Russian supporters, the author paints a dark picture of dastardly and nefarious forces at work, manipulated by the Kremlin. It appears that paranoid anticommunist fantasies of ‘reds under the bed’ controlled by Moscow have been updated and metamorphosed into new illusions of the Kremlin’s international influence.

Indeed, if there is a foreign power exerting a malign influence in Australia, look no further than Washington.

If the Cossacks in Australia are a repository of ultranationalist and militarist values, and upholding the social conservatism of the Russian Orthodox Church, then that should be no surprise. The imperialist states have nurtured, and provided sanctuary to, precisely the militarist and ultrarightist Cossacks for decades.

In fact, similarly to Nikolai Tolstoy and James Bond, you expressed remorse for having failed to provide sanctuary for Nazi-collaborating Cossacks, because they were appropriate cannon fodder for your regime changes fantasies. Imperialist states use extremist fighters, rebranding them refugees. Once their utility has expired, their extremism is used against them.

Indeed, the objection to the ultranationalist extremism of the Cossacks sounds hollow, because Washington and London (with Canberra in tow), willingly use and heroise ultranationalist Russians who work in line with regime change objectives.

In March of this year, Russian fighters, attached to and trained by the Ukrainian military, made a stunning public relations incursion into Belgorod, southern Russia. The anti-Putin soldiers, named the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) and the Freedom of Russia legion, espouse white nationalist and racist perspectives, seeking to establish an imperial Russian society. In fact, these Russian groups are directly modelled on, and trace their ideological pedigree to, the Russian Liberation Army of General Andrei Vlasov, a Nazi collaborationist outfit which fought for the German army.

I have no interest in Cossack nationalism, or prioritising Russians over Ukrainians, or one nation over another. I am not interested in cultivating nationalist resentments. I am interested in exposing the monumental hypocrisies of the Anglo-Atlantic alliance, which perpetuates hatred in the service of war.

It has been 16 years since Liam Neeson first played Bryan Mills, retired ex-Green Beret and CIA officer, who goes on a one-man vigilante-style, retribution-driven hunt to track down the criminals who kidnapped his daughter. Taken, launched in 2008, has become famous mostly for introducing the world to those intimidating, memorable lines growled by the grizzled Neeson – “what I do have is a particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career; skills which make me a nightmare for people like you.”

Neeson has since gone on to cement his place as an action movie star, basically recycling the same cynical, world-weary and aging veteran military man deployed into action in different environments; on a plane (Nonstop), on a train (The Commuter), an ice-covered roads (The Ice Road), a ski resort (Cold Pursuit).

Ok, Liam, we get it – you are an action movie star.

You know the old saying about life imitating art? Perhaps we can apply the reverse. There is a real life, aging veteran who deployed his particular combination of lethal skill sets to multiple situations and combat zones. No, he did not wear black leather jackets – though he did fight in various weather zones and military forces. Proving his worth as a soldier in the icy conditions of his native country, he went on to fight in the humid, stifling jungles of Vietnam.

Larry Thorne, American Green Berets participant, began his life as Finnish soldier Lauri Törni. The Green Berets, an American Special Forces unit, began in 1952 as the particular brainchild of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA. Undergoing rigorous training in guerrilla warfare, sabotage tactics, surveillance, the recruit has to be equipped with strong physical and mental stamina.

Thorne, as Lauri Törni came to be known in the US, contributed significantly to the training regime of this new unit. He honed his particular unique skill set, not only fighting for Finland, but also as an officer in the Waffen SS during the Second World War.

Let’s elaborate some relevant background here, because in order to understand Thorne and his actions, we have to examine the tensions between Finland and the USSR during the interwar period (1918-39).

Finland was given independence from Imperial Russia in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Lenin and the Communist leadership accepted that non-Russian nationalities should have their independence. The Communist ideology inspired the abortive, short lived Red Finland experiment in 1918. Finnish workers established their own Soviet republic.

That experiment would be mercilessly crushed by an alliance of anticommunist privileged Finns, backed up by German troops. The Finnish ruling class, headed by General Carl Mannerheim, violently suppressed the Finnish workers, assisted in this undertaking by German light infantry, the Jaegers. Ironically, Mannerheim had trained as an officer in Tsarist Russia.

The Finnish civil war established Mannerheim’s reputation as an able military commander, but also demonstrated his willingness to kill his fellow Finns, enabled by outside support. It was not the last time that Germans and Finns would fight together.

Finland had acquired the territory of Karelia, along the Finnish-Soviet border. In 1939, with tensions increasing between Moscow and Berlin, the Kremlin was worried that Finland would be used as a staging post for launching German troops. Leningrad was close to the Finnish border. Moscow was concerned that with Finnish-controlled territory surrounding Leningrad, the latter could easily become encircled.

Mannerheim, understandably, did not want to cede Finnish territory.

The 1939-40 Finnish-Soviet war, popularly known as the Winter War, pitted the smaller and militarily weaker Finland against the might of the Soviet Union. The Finns, and Lauri Törni who was by now an officer, performed admirably, inflicting heavy losses on the Soviets. However, the Finns eventually lost, and had to cede even more territory than the Kremlin demanded prior to the war’s outbreak.

Finland was the underdog to be sure – it is much smaller by geography, population and economic power compared to its eastern neighbour. However, Finland was an underdog with powerful German friends in Europe.

Though Mannerheim insisted that Finland was not an ally of Nazi Germany, his government did everything it could to assist the Wehrmacht in its invasion of the USSR. Finland mined the waters in the USSR’s maritime territory, and allowed German forces to be deployed for an eventual attack on Leningrad from Finland.

Back to Lauri Törni – joining the Waffen SS, he distinguished himself in battle. After the war was over, non-German Nazi collaborators reinvented themselves as simple patriots fighting for the liberation of their respective nations. Just how implementing the Waffen SS programme of racial extermination of Jews, Slavs and ethnic minorities would assist in their emancipatory struggles, is never explained.

Imprisoned for treason by the Finnish authorities after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Lauri Törni escaped and made his way to the United States. There he found a nation not only willing to forget the recent past, but also to forget his service in the criminal and psychopathic Waffen SS organisation.

The Cold War had begun, and Larry Thorne, recent immigrant, could offer a particular set of skills, skills cultivated over a long period of time, skills which made him an invaluable asset for people like the US intelligence establishment.

If you contribute a multiple skill toolkit such as parachuting, skiing, knife-fighting and hand-to-hand combat, then the Green Berets were the outfit best suited to your resume. Unconventional warfare was a crucial part of the Cold War, and fighting in different nations in covert conditions was a must.

Thorne not only trained new recruits, but was himself deployed to Vietnam. He served two tours of duty, earning commendations for his valour. In 1965, at the age of 46, Thorne crashed his military helicopter while on a secret mission to Laos. His remains were located in 1999, and he was interred in the Arlington National Cemetery in 2003.

What does it say about us in the Anglophone West, when we rejected Jewish refugees from Europe during the war, only to provide sanctuary to their murderers and associated Eastern European collaborators after the conflict ended?

And Liam Neeson – you are an amazingly talented actor; enough with the action movies already.