https://brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/allison-pearsons-action-man-fetish

30 Sep 2026

Lede: A deranged and bloodthirsty defence of the SAS and a dismissal of war
crimes accusations is exactly what we can expect from one of the Telegraph's
worst.

...

Grenfell goes on in the interview to detail soldiers talking casually to her
about war crimes. Last year, a senior special forces officer told the inquiry
that he was concerned "that the issue of extra-judicial killings was not
confined to a small number of soldiers... but was potentially widespread and was
apparently known to many within UKSF [special forces]". In the same evidence
session, he referred to toddlers who had been shot in their beds beside their
parents.

...

To expect elite soldiers, 'the best of the best' not to shoot toddlers in the
head is too much to ask according to Allison. And with a grim inevitability, she
reaches for George Orwell to back up her position: Grenfell's mindset is
symptomatic of a liberal complacency about the defence of the realm which has
had the leisure to take hold during a long and blessed period of peace. A peace
which, ironically, has been bought for us by the blood sacrifice of the kind of
men increasingly held to the same ethical standards as a primary school
headteacher. As George Orwell observed in his Notes on Nationalism: "Those who
abjure violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their
behalf."

There is another passage from that essay, written by Orwell in 1945 while the
embers of the Second World War were still glowing, which I suspect Pearson will
never quote: There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when
'our' side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened,
even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some
other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified -
still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases
to function.

That is exactly what Pearson is engaged in. There is no crime that the SAS could
commit that she would not condone or, in fact, endorse. She talks about UK
special forces like they're a commercial product to export, some marvellous
marmalade or a particularly potent jar of Marmite:

Cont'd