What's the Deal with This Super Racist British Army Forum?

Most users of the Army Rumour Service (ARRSE) are ex-servicemen. They spend their days shit-posting about Top Gear and reminiscing about "rubbing out Muzzie scum" in the good old days. Several seem to have a slightly shaky grasp on the Geneva Convention, and/or openly explain how to commit war crimes (if you're interested, this should be done by "saying 'Poor guy, we're obliged to give him first aid' and 'accidentally' kneeling on his trachea while checking his wounds, or injecting him with an air embolism instead of morphine").

ARRSE has no official ties to the army, but nor is it an obscure, half-dead message board where three neo-Nazis and a sex bot cast out hate speech and spam into the void. It gets 5 million hits a month, has been quoted in the House of Lords, and the MoD has acknowledged its popularity among the armed forces. The BBC, the Times, the Guardian and the Telegraph have all run stories citing ARRSE as an authoritative source of army opinion, though the Telegraph did flirtatiously concede the site was "rude and naughty".

"I fucking hate Africa," writes one anonymous browser, who is of the opinion that the continent is full of "thick mongo cunts". He goes on: "Besides the animals it's shit, and even some of the animals are shit." The budding David Attenborough concludes: "Africa would be better off with a bubonic plague sweeping through it."

But beyond this type of sub-4chan race-baiting, serious political conversations on the site are also full of hatred. The idea of paying slave reparations, for example, provokes a furious backlash: "Nigger is one of the softer insults in here," ruminates one user. "But it is nigger heavy today J." The n-word is used fairly seldom compared to "Muzzie", which crops up on an almost daily basis. "I have yet to meet a Muslim that I'd trust and doubt that I ever will," one user writes.

Others are less coy: "I think that the Muzzies and the Jewboys are the most fucked up people on Earth;" "I don't care if I'm called racist if it's by a paki, chink, beaner, coon or sand nigger." In one thread, soldiers who served in Iraq share slang words describing the locals they were purportedly there to protect: "thieving ragheads", "choggies", "dune coons".

However, it is Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (universally referred to here as "Pikeys") that come in for the heaviest abuse. Several posters suggest torching Traveller caravan sites and "laughing manically as the pikeys burn like dogs". "Shooting Pikeys is the kindest thing to do," another poster observes. Both Muslims and Travelling people are portrayed as dirty, perverted litter-louts.

Irony is dead, irony remains dead and we have killed it, and so the British Army has been nominated for the "Corporate Straight Ally" gong at this year's British LGBT awards. Straight ally-ship is in short supply on these message-boards, though, as posters guffaw about the prison rape of transgender women abandoned in all-male jails and exult in the suicide of transgender inmates such as Vicky Thompson. Trans people are inevitably referred to as "it", as in "its hoop is going to be a tad looser after 12 weeks [in prison]", or "its boyfriend is a dirty queer". "Faggots" and "dykes" come in for similar treatment.

In one strange thread, a user whose avatar is "Papa Smurf" approaches the forum for advice. His next-door neighbour's 15-year-old daughter is a "pretty young thing" with a "lovely figure", but "sadly, this has made her a target for every half caste and wigger gangsta wannabe for miles around". Papa Smurf is aware that age is a vector of intersectionality, and as a "middle-aged man" he knows he may sound like a "perv" if he tells the teenager that she could be doing "better" than these people he deems unsuitable. What should he do? It's a real conundrum, but one of the forum's agony aunts has a solution. "Fuck her," he wittily proposes. "If she wants to be a little slag then so be it. Better still, rape and kill her. She'll only end up with five kids and a free house." And so on, and so on.

Browsing the site gives some sense of what life must be like for those poor content moderators in Manila who spend 12 hours a day trawling through the unsolicited dick pics and Isis propaganda skits flagged up by Twitter users. I sat for hours in a fugue state plugging slurs, terms of abuse and obscure slang words for genitalia into the forum's search function, pausing only to look up "choggie" on Urban Dictionary. If you want to try it out yourself, all these posts were publicly accessible at the time of publication. It's mostly safe for work, but browse with caution: the occasional cunnilingus gif does lurch unbidden into view.

Of course, there is a sense in which none of this is particularly surprising. "People on anonymous internet forum make idiotic racist jokes" is hardly the scoop of the century, but language matters.

Sharing a story about soldiers beating two disabled teenagers unconscious "for entertainment" while calling them "mongoloids", one poster says he is now "ashamed of the times he's used the term 'mong'". Every "slut", every "sand nigger" and every "gyppo" casually dropped on the site should come with the same baggage. One in eight soldiers commits a violent crime once they leave the army: they need support, counselling and help finding civilian work, not a cesspit of racist abuse and incitements to violence.

Last year, members of the Met Police were caught posting anti-Gypsy hate material on a secret Facebook page. That incident was enough to spark an internal investigation, and there was no comment on the Met page that is not repeated multiple times in more hateful terms on the ARRSE forums. ARRSE and its parent company did not respond to a request for comment from VICE, but in 2007 a spokesperson for ARRSE helpfully explained to another Army website that the forum was racist, because the army was racist, because society was racist.

Shay Clipson is a trustee of the National Alliance of Gypsy, Traveller and Roma Women. Understandably rattled by the sight of armed servicemen calling for the slaughter of her friends and family, she has filed a formal complaint to the Ministry of Defence. The MoD say they "share her abhorrence at the hateful and upsetting comments" on the site, and that they will be investigating the posts in question as they are aware that a large number of current servicemen make use of the site. However, no action has been taken in the six weeks since the complaint was filed. "When you've got an army that hate us that much and a government that hate us that much, you worry about what will happen to us," says Shay.

There is something faintly undignified about watching members of our armed services troll Mumsnet and debate whether or not they'd "shag" Jayda Fransen, one of the leaders of Britain First (60 percent said they would, FYI). But the jokes are all the more alarming in the context of an armed force whose own ex-members describe it as "institutionally racist". When men charged with peacekeeping in predominantly Muslim countries tear into "Muzzie scum" on a daily basis, their comments cannot be brushed aside as "rude and naughty" banter.

@hashtagbroom

More from VICE:

Revealed: The Army's 'Study Tours' Are Luxury Trips to Meet Dictators

This Is What It's Like to Be Britain's Youngest Mayor

How to Tell When a Politics Meme Is Bullshit