Anzac and the Pageantry of Deception
On April 25, along Melbourne’s arterial Swanston Street, the military parade can be witnessed with its bannered, medalled upholstery, crowds lost in metals, ribbons and commemorative decor. Many, up on their feet since the dawn service, keen to show the decorations that say: “I turned up”. Service personnel, marked by a sprig of rosemary.
The greater the pageantry, the greater the coloured, crimson deception. In the giddy disruptions caused by war, this tendency can be all too readily found. The dead are remembered on the appointed day, but the deskbound planners responsible for sending them to their fate, including the bunglers and the zealous, are rarely called out. The memorial statements crow with amnesiac sweetness, and all the time, those same planners will be happy to add to the numbers of the fallen.
The events of April 25, known in Australia as Anzac Day, are saccharine and tinged about sacrifice, a way of explicating the unmentionable and the barely forgivable. But make no mistake about it: this was the occasion when Australians, with their counterparts from New Zealand as part of the Australian New Zealand Corps, foolishly bled on Turkish soil in a doomed campaign. Modern Australia, a country rarely threatened historically, has found itself in wars aplenty since the 19th century.
The Dardanelles campaign was conceived by the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and, like many of his military ventures, ended in calamitous failure. The Australian officers and politicians extolling the virtues of the Anzac soldiers tend to ignore that fact – alongside the inconvenient truth that Australians were responsible for a pre-emptive attack on the Ottoman Empire to supposedly shorten a war that lasted in murderous goriness till November 1918. To this day, the Turks have been cunning enough to treat the defeated invaders with reverence, tending to the graves of the fallen Anzacs and raking in tourist cash every April.
For the Australian public, it was far better to focus on such words as those of British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett written on the occasion of the Gallipoli landings: “There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and the storming of the heights.” Ashmead-Bartlett went on to note the views of General William Birdwood, British commander of the Anzac forces at Gallipoli: “he couldn’t sufficiently praise the courage, endurance and the soldierly qualities of the Colonials.” They “where happy because they had tried for the first time and not found wanting.”
In March 2003, these same “colonials” would again participate in the invasion of a sovereign state, claiming, spuriously, that they were ridding the world of a terrorist threat in the form of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whose weapons of mass destruction were never found, and whose subsequent overthrow led to the fracturing of the Middle East. Far from being an act of bravery, the measure, in alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom, was a thuggish measure of gang violence against a country weakened by years of sanctions.
When options to pursue peace or diplomacy were there, Australian governments have been slavish and supine before the dictates and wishes of other powers keen on war. War, in this context, is affirmation, assertion, cleansing. War is also an admission to a certain chronic lack of imagination, and an admission to inferiority.
The occasion of Anzac Day in 2024 is one acrid with future conflict. Australia has become, and is becoming increasingly, an armed camp for US interests for a war that will be waged by dunderheads over such island entities as Taiwan, or over patches of land that will signify which big power remains primary and ascendant in the Indo- and Asia-Pacific. It is a view promoted with sickly enthusiasm by press outlets and thinktank enclaves across the country, funded by the Pentagon and military contractors who keep lining their pockets and bulking their accounts.
Central to this is the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the UK and the United States, which features a focus on nuclear powered submarines and technology exchange that further subordinates Australia, and its tax paying citizens, to the steering wishes of Washington. Kurt Campbell, US Deputy Secretary of State, cast light on the role of the pact and what it is intended for in early April. Such “additional capacity” was intended to play a deterrent role, always code for the capacity to wage war. Having such “submarines from a number of countries operating in close coordination that could deliver conventional ordinance from long distances [would have] enormous implications in a variety of scenarios, including in cross-strait circumstances.” That’s Taiwan sorted.
Ultimately, the Australian role in aiding and abetting empires has been impressive, long and dismal. If it was not throwing in one’s lot with the British empire in its efforts to subjugate the Boer republics in South Africa, where many fought farmers not unlike their own, then it was in the paddy fields and jungles of Vietnam, doing much the same for the United States in its global quest to beat off atheistic communism. Australians fought in countries they barely knew, in battles they barely understood, in countries they could barely name.
This occasion is often seen as one to commemorate the loss of life and the integrity of often needless sacrifice, when it should be one to understand that a country with choices in war and peace decided to neglect them. The pattern risks repeating itself.
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8 comments
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JulianP -
GL -
Denis Hay -
Arnd -
Steve Davis -
New England Cocky -
Arnd -
Steve Davis
Return to home pageThere’s so much that could be said about the Australian predilection for getting involved in armed conflict in countries that were no threat to Australia or its citizens, it’s hard to know where to start. So much has been written about these earlier off-shore conflicts that it seems nothing more can usefully be added – except perhaps to remind readers that all have, one way or another, been covered by the “Anzac Cloak” – that wonderful fantasy to justify more of the same.
[ https://johnmenadue.com/time-to-accept-the-truth-about-the-legend-of-anzac/ ]
Perhaps it might be sufficient to say only that anyone who has experienced armed conflict would not, unless mentally unwell, want to repeat the experience. It is utterly dreadful; there is simply no redeeming feature to be found in it or for it. The effects can last for generations, not just upon the participants, but can leave environments strewn with UXBs and arable and other areas forever toxic.
Who the hell needs that?
Despite my own experience informing me that there’s never any good reason to stop talking and start shooting, there will always be those who believe “might-is-right” and should always prevail, mostly against common sense and the intrinsic value of human life.
As Dr. Kampmark notes, Australia has become an armed camp which is getting bigger by the day, and the sole purpose of which is to extend armed force into the Pacific (and elsewhere). If you are OK with that, good for you. I am not and never will be.
One of my ex-Service colleagues vented his frustration at the present level of war-mongering by suggesting that anyone urging for war should be given a popgun and a one-way ticket AND have their passport cancelled. I would not go that far, but would happily contribute to the ticket.
Whenever I think of not just Anzac Day (but other days that seem to celebrate death and destruction) one song in particular pops into my head, and to me still, even after all the years since it first came out, has relevance not just for the past but the present and future.
I have the greates of respect for the hundreds of soldiers who have died or been mamed while in their eyes they were “serving their country”. But the reality, wars are a racket to protect corporate interests and the powerful: https://youtu.be/74wrX8rKtzw?si=e0vop7YHgcCIXc7K
I despise the politicians who send our military men and women into mostly US illegal wars of aggression that have nothing to do with protection Australia. In my view, a total misuse of our military.
Denis, do you only despise the politicians who send soldiers to war? Should you not also despise the citizens who elect the politicians who send the soldiers to war? Especially in jurisdictions with a functional democracy like Australia?
And does not this voting citizenry include the very soldiers – and their siblings, spouses, parents, friends, work mates, etc.- who are being sent to war, and who willingly go there?
Arnd, it’s pointless to despise voters whose ignorance or lack of empathy is the result of conditioning by our liberal system and liberal culture.
You know that Marx described the alienation, the isolation, the immiseration to which we are all exposed in a liberal society.
You also know of the Proudhonian sense of justice that we all have.
It’s that sense of justice that must be encouraged to flower, to become a constant in people’s lives.
Our only hope is people.
@Julian P: My father never spoke about his war active service. When I went for my conscription medical the ex-service doctor commented that ”war was not a fit job for any young Australian”. Indeed, it was an open secret that more medicals were failed than passed.
Perhaps Anglosphere politicians could fight their wars like the Zulus did; giver each war proponent a knife and the community follows the emerging survivor.
Since `1945, the USA (United States of Apartheid) has been actively involved in over 80 conflicts for the benefit of their NE military industrial complex that manufactures over 90% of world armaments at a cost of literally millions of innocent persons.
Why should any Australian government subsidise the imperialist ambitions of American multinational corporations at the expense of providing improved public infrastructure for Australians??
@Arnd: The present Australian situation is that ANY Prim Monster may send Australian military personnel into jeopardy on their own cognisance WITHOUT REFERENCE TO PARLIAMENT ….. at full expense to Australian taxpayers.
The 1915 ANZAC Cove military action was arguably Australia’s greatest defeat at the hands of the English. LEST.WE.FORGET.
Steve,
You are, of course, perfectly correct – and I did not intend to advocate for despising voters. I merely picked up on Denis’s choice of expression, with the intent of leading to the conclusion that if we should refrain from despising voters, we should on the same basis also refrain from despising politicians.
Hard to do, I know! But probably (arguably?) a necessary.shift in attitude. Politicians can’t sustain governing against the popular will for very long. For politicians to foster extensive preparation for and participation in war, the voting public must acquiesce, or at least be apathetic.
NEC:
That may well be so. But no prime minister, no matter how comprehensively vested with near dictatorial powers, could turn the attitude and outlook of the whole country a full 180°, from pacifist peacenik to belligerent war mongering with a few autocratic decrees.
This sort of thing needs a long run-up -n.b. the decades-long process of procuring the USUKAU nukular youboats – which offers plenty of opportunities for dissent. If the volonté générale can’t be arsed to object to sabre-rattling militarism, then any final decisions by a prime minister to put the voluntary members of a professional military force in harm’s way should be expected to follow of logical necessity.
Arnd, all is forgiven. 🙂