From the Middle Ages to patrol in Afghanistan, the dark history of the crusader symbol

For an alleged war criminal fighting to clear his reputation in the Federal Court, we certainly keep hearing a lot of very unsavoury things about former special forces officer Ben Roberts-Smith. The latest detail, reported in the Nine papers, was that Roberts-Smith wore a patch with crusader insignia while fighting in Afghanistan. The Department of Defence later doctored the image to remove the patch before sending it to the Australian War Memorial.

Defence won’t respond to questions about why the image was edited, instead telling Crikey it “does not condone or permit the use, display or adoption of symbols, emblems and iconography that are at odds with Defence values”.

But any embarrassment Defence might have about the image makes sense. Crusader crosses and other medieval iconography have a long history in far-right circles. White supremacists fetishise the Middle Ages, and see the crusades as a glorious race war. For Australian soldiers to wear them while deployed in a Muslim country sends a startling message.

Widespread symbols

Roberts-Smith wasn’t the only soldier to wear crusader insignia. While Defence didn’t respond to questions about how many images they’ve doctored, the ABC’s Mark Willacy suggested “quite a few” soldiers in Afghanistan wore similar crosses on their uniforms.

The photo of Roberts-Smith dates to before 2011, suggesting the practice had been ongoing for many years. In 2018, then-army chief Angus Campbell prohibited the use of “death symbols” and other iconography on soldiers’ uniforms, including Spartan symbols and the Grim Reaper. Campbell was widely criticised for bringing “political correctness” into the military. Earlier this year, when Peter Dutton took over as Defence Minister, the calls that the army was getting “too woke” returned, with the ban on symbols again being touted as a sign of military decline.

What they mean

Campbell didn’t single out the political connotations behind the use of such symbols. But the crusader cross in particular has a dark history. The far right have always been fascinated with the crusaders and the Middle Ages. They see the period, wrongly, as a time of white racial purity in Europe. In the contemporary far-right imagination, the crusades were a righteous conflict between Islam and the West, says Deakin University medieval and whiteness studies exert Helen Young.

“Having a symbol like that in Afghanistan tells the local people that he is their enemy, that ‘I’m here fighting all Muslims’,” she said.

The connection between the far right and the crusades has been increasingly prominent during the Trump years, when the internet’s most reactionary sewers, egged on by an increasingly red-pilled Republican base, came bursting into the open. Flags and t-shirts with crusader crosses were on full display during the Capitol riots. The old crusader war cry Deus vult (“God wills it”) started popping up online, and on flags at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

“The crusader symbols have been taken up by white supremacists really substantially,” Young said.

It isn’t hard to find links between crusader symbolism and white nationalist violence. The Ku Klux Klan used medieval symbols, as did terrorists in Oslo and Christchurch. And while there’s no suggestion the ADF is full of white supremacists, Roberts-Smith’s comes with a troubling context. As far back as World War I, nationalist imagery highlighted the parallels between diggers fighting at Gallipoli, and the Crusaders “liberating” the holy land.

Beyond the crusader patch, there have been numerous “incidents” involving soldiers in Afghanistan displaying less ambiguous far-right imagery. There’s the time soldiers flew a Nazi flag over their vehicle while in Afghanistan. Or when special forces troops displayed a Confederate flag. And in that context, Roberts-Smith’s patch doesn’t feel like an isolated incident.