Complete bullshit. Regimes that punish whistleblowers harder than war criminals reveal themselves as dreaming of tyranny.
The entire trial was cooked, and I’m furious :(
That non parole period is nuts too, pure revenge. What danger does this man represent? If he’s out on the streets some war criminals better watch their backs?
edit: I should add, it’s also quite frustrating that at the end of all this top brass has had no light shone on them, which was his initial goal on leaking. He thought the SAS was being investigated overmuch as a distraction from leadership failures. I guess we’ll never know. A slap on the wrist for the executioners, no systematic investigation, and an inconvenient man in gaol.
The understanding young people have of the world around them is so heavily influenced by algorithm-based social media now, and English-based social media is in-turn heavily influenced by American current affairs which tends to dominate the algorithms. It is very hard for the trial of one Australian whistleblower to compete with that and even if students are aware of it the pro-Palestine/pro-Israel student movements are so much more appealing. They give those young people the opportunity to become part of a global movement and feel like they are effecting real change beyond their own borders. Additionally I’m not sure if the Afghanistan War is actually relevant to the current generation of undergraduate students. They were very young during the period in which it was something Australians felt strongly about and likely can’t connect to the historic war crimes committed by Australian soldiers there in the same way they can connect to the war crimes they are seeing in their feeds now.
As a young person who is also an undergraduate student (so no excuses I guess for not starting a movement myself) I fully agree, and even though I nuked my social media except Facebook (that is a work in progress), we even have that problem here. I become so disenfranchised when I switch from ‘local’ to ‘all’ because it’s just US politics --mostly identity politics-- and I manifest on those problems which I feel like they will be an endless debate, and it is very distracting from the very real problems of today, especially in Australia. Like who actually gives a fuck about Taylor Swift? or Joe Biden? or whether someone shouldn’t be used in a meme template because they said something we don’t like?
Sidetracked a bit there, what I’m really trying to say is. Yes. Shut up about America and give a fuck about Australia