Anzac Day further militarizes Australian culture

Australian culture will be further militarized on Friday.

Poppies have become aligned
with the Anzac legend. 

Anzac Day is a right and proper way to remember those who donned our colours to protect values important to Australians, but what happens on Friday is little more than the exploitation of populist sentiment for political gain.

That will be an unpopular view as many are clearly unable to separate the brutality, violence, death and catastrophe of war from the sentimentality they experience for events such as Anzac Day.

War is clearly a human failure bringing only sadness and while we should recall that fragility in our thinking, our focus should be on those things we have done well, and going to war is certainly not one of them.

Next year is the centenary of the ANZAC landings at Gallipoli and its recognition is going to cost you and me money; cash that could resolve many national social problems, and maybe even ease the apparently overwhelming budgetary problems Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey repeatedly bleats about.

It is correct that what is forgotten is repeated, but let us remember those who wore our colours in a dignified, simple, and cheaper way, and turn our attention, resources and innovative ideas toward today and the creation and building of a nation best equipped to deal with such things as energy scarcity, climate change and an economy teetering on disarray.

Rather than pander to populist views about something that has become distorted by a century of myth, we should break loose from the past and prepare ourselves for a future quite different from what was.

Greens leader, Christine Milne.

Greens leader, Christine Milne, has said that what is happening in Australia presently is a struggle between the past and the future and although she wasn’t referring directly to events such as Anzac Day, she was making reference about our inability to escape the past and willingly acknowledge the challenges of tomorrow.

Tony Abbott’s strange decision that saw him reach into the past and drag into today the considered long-dead idea of Sirs and Dames along with his perverse unwillingness to accept the unfolding realities of climate change gives another clear hint why his government prefers the certainties of the past rather than confronting the dilemmas of tomorrow.

The militarization of Australia suits the dated ideologies of the neo-liberals, such as the present Australian government, for with it come understandings that the men of yesterday can grasp.

Confrontations of a century ago, or even recent contemporary history, are as dead as those who died in them, and so rather than spending time, money and our creative energy on remembering them, we should be switching our attention to the future.

Celebrate Anzac Day if you must, but then turn your attention to tomorrow, the future.

Darkened poker machines promote epiphany of how it should be

The darkened poker machines stood like tombstones in a cemetery.

The players stood silently in the eerie dusk-like light of the auditorium as the haunting sounds of the Last Post echoed around the room.

Screens dotted about told of the drama and alluded to the obvious cost of war and cast the minds of those silent poker players back to the chaos in which thousands were injured or died for Australia, freedom or whatever it was that ignited their passions.

The ninety second emotive package accompanied by a sombre, but authoritative voice designed to elicit understanding and sympathy for war, encouraged we recall conflicts past “lest we forget”.

Echoing around this momentary poker machine graveyard in an environment even the most adventurous thinkers among those who died could never have imagined was a story of war that elicited an emotionally shallow response that overlooked the real societal debt.

The obvious and blatant costs of war are easy to identify, for it is measured in the death and injury to thousands of military people, millions of civilians and immense damage to the infrastructure upon which we all depend.

However there is a cost we can’t see or measure; a cost that is embedded deep within societies; a cost that emerges generations later and although mistakenly believing we are inured to repeating earlier errors, we do exactly that and with renewed vigour set about to kill each other.

Ghosts past march across the screens as a sentinel to alert us of previous ills and quieten our primeval need to confront the other, but nationalistic hubris erupts from such displays and has the reverse effect enhancing our belief in militaristic solutions.

This year is the centenary of what was originally known as “The Great War”, but became known as the “First World War” when in 1939 the world was at war again in “World War Two” when humanity stooped to new depravities as we busied ourselves slaughtering each other.

Considered in geologic terms, humanity is still in the crib and although we need to understand our history, it borders on obscene to devote so much of our time, ingenuity, commitment and money to pinpoint a fleeting moment from a century ago.

Our flirtation with this twinkling in history only distorts and delays the growth of humanity to further understand that progress is a product of collaboration, cooperation and communication rather than conflict and violence that arises from the preservation of baseless, and therefore unimportant cultural beliefs.

The world’s annual military budget creeps towards $2000 billion (Australia’s was an indecent $26.2b last year) and rather than seek comfort through bigger military expenditure, we need to look elsewhere and it is not to be found in the preservation of memories from our modern past.

War is a reality, but our imagination sustains it

Humans, it is believed, are unique among earth’s fauna in being able to imagine.



Lawrence H. Keeley
helps us understand
some about war in
his 1996 book.

In fact, it is such a powerful facility that the lives of many are completely derailed through an addiction to uninhibited imagination.

The power of the mind is such that it can lock an individual, a community, a nation or a whole raft of people around the globe into a mindset that draws criticism from an equal number.

Being right or wrong can depend upon one’s faith, belief in science or an alliance with whatever frippery it is that has swept around the world ensnaring the vulnerable imaginations of people as it went.

As humans we are loaded with frailties and those fragilities are capitalized on by those eager to see the life, and its various incumbencies, they prefer embedded in the world community.

Imagination, with all its distortions and blemishes shapes our lives and another of those moments upon which its continuance hinges on imagination has just passed.

The invasion of Turkey by Australian and New Zealand soldiers and other allied forces in April 1915 has set alight the Australian imagination and although fundamentally wrong, hundreds of deaths are made right through appeal to misplaced human sentimentalities.

The Anzac Day “industry” is driven by governments at all levels and they obscure the brutality and tragedy of war behind a murkiness that dissuades us from allowing our imaginations to focus on the actual catastrophe, rather to be drawn in by repeatedly retold stories of mateship, valour, courage and success in the face of overwhelming opposition.

Life for most of us, beyond a few personal highs and lows, is pretty bland and rarely do we ever experience anything like the dynamics of a war that allow us to unleash our emotions and imaginations.

Anzac Day is one of the moments that directly target those sleeping emotions and imaginations tapping into our covert nationalism from which our politicians draw their sustenance and legitimacy.

In his 1996 book “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage”, Oxford University archaeology professor, Lawrence H. Keeley, said: “The stimulus of war has incited human beings to prodigies of ingenuity, improvisation, cooperation, vandalism, and cruelty. It is the richest field on which to match wits and luck; no peaceful endeavour can equal its penalties for failure, and few can exceed its rewards for success.

“It remains the most theatrical of human activities, combining tragedy, high drama, melodrama, spectacle, action, farce, and even low comedy, War displays the human in extreme,” he wrote.

The good life is found in anchored emotions, with war quite the opposite when passions are let off the leash, set free and so able to respond without inhibition to our imaginations, wicked or otherwise.