Lest we Forget.

[lukeb1961]

I know you will not understand. I don't care that you will not understand. I don't lose sleep over your opinions.
But I was telling you the truth. ANZAC day to me is a nonsense that glorifies WAR.
It is perpetuated by the Government of the day as a quasi-religious thing. That is my honest opinion.

My family has had men killed in three wars, and others who endured the Japanese. As a small boy I spent alot of time with a man who had served at Gallipoli and France and suffered shellshock and hideous nightmares for 60 years.
It doesn't take an Einstein to realise WAR ruined that young lad on a camel in front of the pyramids for the rest of his entire, tormented life. My mother hated the Japanese until the day she died.  Did that help bring her young uncles back?

Is any of that a reason to clap and cheer WAR? To continue to laud the actions of Australia in WAR belittles the actions of Australians who do and have done so much of  value to this country each and every day since Federation.
Do we parade our Doctors and Nurses? Our school teachers, our Professors? Our Civil Engineers? Do we get an epic telecast each year of our Surf Life Saving Clubs through the city?
No. Instead we continue to push forth the endless wars as something to hold higher than all the things that DO make Australia what it is.

That's wrong. That is absolutely wrong.
Make of it what you will.

Luke
 

[AjayVMX]

Luke,

While I think I can possibly understand your point of view on Anzac day, I think that you are missing the point of Anzac day entirely.

Firstly, I don't believe in any way that it glorifies war.  Far from it.  It actually strongly opens younger people up to the idea that it is futile and destructive.  Our generation is the first to not have to particpate in a major war and we should all be very thankful.  One of the reasons that is so is because of the terrible memories of past wars and those memories are kept alive by the Anzac day commemoration.  Thus, Anzac day does not glorify war, it reminds us why we should undertake all steps possible to prevent it.

Of course, Anzac day is also a strong show of thanks to the Australians who, when faced with the reality of war, stepped up to the plate and some paid the ultimate price for thier country.  To compare that commitment with people in regular professions isn't really valid in my view and trivialises the gravity of the event.

Unfortunately, wars do happen (thankfully with less severity in recent times) when certain sectors of the human race decide that allowing others to live in peace is not possible and are not prepared to compromise.  So wars are unlikely to stop happening anytime soon. 

The important thing to remember however is that our ability to speak freely (and even discuss matters such as Anzac day on an internet forum) without fear of persecution or imprisonment are primarily due to the actions of those who put their lives on the line in past wars. 

And Anzac day is the vehicle to thank them for our freedoms.

Lest We Forget.

[Lozza]

I don't agree AJ in recent times the 'Spirit of Anzac' has been a repeated theme in the general media. Very little discussion is devoted to the ugly reality of wars. Today's view of wars is of  weapons with 'surgical precision' drone strikes and the 'war on terror'(what ever that is) That is that mostly civilians not soldiers die. Yet we have no monuments to them.
When I went to school we spent a lot of time learning just how stupid a military exercise the Gallipoli campagin was. How sad it was that Australia just blindly did what Whitehall asked and how Australia was still tied to the UK's apron strings.
The redeeming feature of Anzac Day is it honours a spectacular defeat not any  victory.

Free speach is a different issue, that is stifled by complience of the population and branding anything that is going against the current as heresy.

[motomaniac]

My family has had men killed in three wars, and others who endured the Japanese. As a small boy I spent alot of time with a man who had served at Gallipoli and France and suffered shellshock and hideous nightmares for 60 years.
It doesn't take an Einstein to realise WAR ruined that young lad on a camel in front of the pyramids for the rest of his entire, tormented life. My mother hated the Japanese until the day she died.  Did that help bring her young uncles back?

Is any of that a reason to clap and cheer WAR?
Luke
 

Thats the whole point. Most Australian families have similar histories. Its ANZAC day not WAR day, its Lest we forget the individual's who didnt come back or whos lives were irrevocably changed becaused they were involved in war .ANZACS in both WW's went in defence not aggression.Would you have preffered that no action was taken when Hitler invaded Poland and inflicted immeasurable suffering on people of different countries ,religions and political persausions?
The point is that Anzacs went and sacrificed themselves to defend those who were suffering.
We honor them for that.
Lest we forget

[motomaniac]

I don't agree AJ in recent times the 'Spirit of Anzac' has been a repeated theme in the general media. Very little discussion is devoted to the ugly reality of wars. Today's view of wars is of  weapons with 'surgical precision' drone strikes and the 'war on terror'(what ever that is) That is that mostly civilians not soldiers die. Yet we have no monuments to them.

Thats true but that detract from us from honoring our forefathers for what they did.

[GMC]

Is any of that a reason to clap and cheer WAR?

forks sake, we’re not clapping WAR, we are acknowledging the people who gave their lives and limbs for our freedoms.

War sucks
Lack of freedom sucks a damn site more.

I for one appreciate the struggles given before me in order for me to live the life I do, and that has nothing to do with glorifying war.

[k2000x]

amen to that gmc 100%.. ive been watching this thread blow out and wasnt going to join in but:::: i do clap and cheer the men of ww2 my grand father and his brothers went along with many other brave men and i thank them and so everyone should..what would australia be like if the jap's had taken this great country, would it still be this great place to live in

[090]

Man what short sightedness. To say we are clapping war. Such a shallow view. Thank you to all that went to war to DEFEND our country.

[firko]

I'm saddened that you have such a jaundiced view on Anzac Day Luke. I hope that one day you can understand the true meaning of what Anzac Day is truly about.

[Freakshow]

Do we parade our Doctors and Nurses? Our school teachers, our Professors? Our Civil Engineers? Do we get an epic telecast each year of our Surf Life Saving Clubs through the city?

Next time i see a nurse or school teacher put there life on the line and risk death thousand of miles from home, eating  and sleeping in mud and shit, they will get the same parade.  tell they do lets just leave it as it is. 

In a climate of nancy political bullshit we have to live with and the piss weak effort the pollies are doing on these so called "refugess 'and so on burning our tax built detention centre because they feel like it.  I thinks its only fair we parade or history whats left of it and some kind of dignity that says.  " fork you - i have had enough and i wont take it any more.

the reason for the march isnt about why we have wars, its about those who stood up and said ill have a crack at defending my life and my families way of life.   Some of these folks even didnt get a choice remeber conscription, if your that upright about war you should be letting them march to say sorry we made you go.  fork we spent how much and how much effort on saying we were sorry to some other mob ..............  why is it its always mr Joe Average gets the bum deal in Au ?  yet they do all the work and take all the punches in life.

Look where complacency and apathy got the  russian in WW2 who though hitler was happy to let them be.  i think some of you are a little short on what its all about, if you dont like it, change the channel on your TV or dont go out in the shed till after 10 am on the day, and you wont even know it was on.

remember every other country has some kind of military parade, great battle or leader displayed at least once a year, so why should we be any differant. or is this more of that huggy pussy political shit coming through, god forbid we might offend someone..  FFS

[Curly3]

I've tried to resist the urge to have a go at Luke, our personal opinions are totally the opposite.
It's because of those who fought for freedom that you can voice your opinion on whatever & whenever without persecution.
I'm sure you're a good fella Luke but this is probably a case of, wrong topic & wrong time.
Yes I know that sounds like a contradiction in terms but as my dear old mum used to say, if you can't say anything good, don't say anything.
I'm not going to hold it against you, I'll agree to disagree.
Steve

[Nathan S]

Ataturk (aka Father of Turkey, aka Mustafa Kemal), 1934, of the fallen ANZACs at Gallipoli:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours... you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land. They have become our sons as well.

The Americanisation of our military legacy is shitful.
My wife found this earlier today:
http://www.heathenscripture.com/anzac-day-not-for-faggots-and-towelheads/

Condensed version:

ANZAC Day not for faggots and towelheads
Posted on April 28, 2011 by geoff

At least, not according to the Australian Christian Lobby. Sure, their main man Jim Wallace used slightly more careful language, but that was the sentiment of what he said. “Just hope that as we remember Servicemen and women today we remember the Australia they fought for – wasn’t gay marriage and Islamic!” was the thoughtful missive he left via Twitter on the 25th.

I generally couldn’t give two shits in a waffle cone what people have to say on Twitter, the place where relevance goes to pick out its funeral clothes in pale blue. But once in a while you get something juicy, someone reposts it, and suddenly giant kerfuffles are exploding over everyone. (They’re kind of like soufflés.)
....
He went on to explain that this revelation of his came about after sitting with his father, a veteran of Tobruk and Milne Bay, who said that he didn’t recognise this Australia as being the one he fought for.
....
The extra-bad taste in the mouth from all this, though, is his invocation of the ANZACs to back up his point. We shouldn’t have gay marriage because ‘the ANZACs’ didn’t fight for that. We should keep an eye on dodgy Muslims because ‘the ANZACs’ sure as hell didn’t fight for them either. It was in the same vein as a particularly lunk-headed individual named Mick (natch), commenting on my pokies article, that restrictions on people’s gambling meant “the anzacs would be turning in their graves.”

To quote another commenter’s rejoinder, “Everyone loves making the ANZACs say what they want them to. They’re kind of like Jesus like that.”

And spot on. As recent years have ticked by, I’ve increasingly come to loathe ANZAC Day. Not the soldiers it honours, but the modern way of supposedly honouring them. Before you get all down on me for my disrespect, check my credentials. Through high school, my uni major, and my honours year, I specialised in Australian First and Second World War history. I’ve read dozens of biographies and memoirs by servicemen, I’ve interviewed numerous WWII vets, and spent countless hours in archives here, in Canberra, and in Singapore. I spent a year in Thailand and Borneo researching prisoner-of-war camps, walked across northern Borneo to retrace a forced march of Aussie soldiers, then drove back and forth several times to follow up on leads. I wrote a book of poems based on some of the stories I found, and I’ve read from it far and wide to try and make sure those stories are heard. My best friend since primary school is an infantry corporal. I probably have a more direct emotional connection to that history than just about anyone who now chooses to invoke its name when April rolls around.

The fact that I do care so much is why ANZAC Days have increasingly become a time to cringe. It’s the resurgent nationalism and mythologising championed by Keating and Howard. Sentimental crud like ‘the ANZAC spirit’, gets thrown around by every chump with a lectern. People get tagged with it for playing football. The modern understanding of the phrase makes it more and more synonymous with a kind of Aussie boganeering. Thousands of young Australians go to Gallipoli to pay their respects by getting shitfaced, watching rock concerts, unrolling their sleeping bags on the graves of the dead, and forking off the next day leaving the place completely trashed for the Turks to clean up. Much like 1915, but with more piss. It’s a short step from this ‘spirit’ to the Aussie pride that saw flags tied on as capes down at Cronulla a few years ago. It seems to appeal to the same demographic that have made “fork off, we’re full” such a big seller down at Bumper Sticker Bonanza.

The most recent dawn service I went to sounded more like a school assembly, with the officially-voted Most Boring Prick on Earth conducting the service, then the tokenism of some Year 12 from an all-girl’s private school reading us her revelations after a trip to Gallipoli. The same myth-heavy sacred-worship shite. The ANZACs were this, the ANZACs were that. No, Hannah Montana. The ANZACs were a bunch of different people. The ANZACs weren’t one thing. ‘They’ didn’t believe in this or that, ‘they’ didn’t have these characteristics. They were a group of individuals.

The sanctity shtick is also popular with politicians who want to push a particular view. ....

All of which brings us, bereft of a segue, back to Mr Wallace. His Twitter post, he said, “was a comment on the nature of the Australia [his father] had fought for, and the need to honour that in the way we preserve it into the future.”

So let me just make sure I’ve got this, Jim. Because soldiers fought and died in 1943, we need to maintain the values they had in 1943. Or do we maintain the values of the ones who fought in 1945? But hang on, they fought and died in 1915 as well… and 1914. So do we wind our values back to then? Do we bring back the Australia Party and the Northern Territory Chief Protector of Aborigines?

Let’s settle on the 1940s in general – Milne Bay and all that. And look at the values of the 1940s. This was an era when it was ok to smack your wife around a bit if she gave you lip. If you went too hard on her too often, then people might tut disapprovingly, like they did with a bloke who kicked his dog. But the odd puffy cheek was nothing to be remarked upon.

This was an era when women were supposed to show respect to men as the heads of the households and their natural superiors.

This was an era when you could pretty casually rape a girl who ended up somewhere alone with you, because if she’d got herself into that situation she was probably asking for it. Girls who said no or changed their minds were just playing hard to get. You know women, right? So fickle, so flighty. It was an era when the Australian occupation troops sent to Japan post-war were involved in the consistent rapes of Japanese women. Not traumatised vengeful former combatants, mind you, but fresh recruits, straight out of training.

This was an era when capital punishment was legal, and conscription was encouraged. This was an era when dodgy foreigners were kept out of the country by being made to sit a test in a language of the examiner’s choosing. Oh, you don’t speak Aramaic? Sorry, you failed. This was an era when Aboriginals weren’t recognised as people. Despite having been here when everyone else rocked up, they weren’t even given citizenship till 1967. Twenty-two years after the war had ended.

Were these the values that our Aussie heroes fought and died for too? Or were these not-so-good values, ones that we can discard? Where’s the distinction, Jim? Where do your values end and your values begin?

Well, guess what. I don’t want to live in the 1940s. I don’t want to live in 1918. I don’t want to brush off Vietnam, Korea, Malaya, because they were morally ambiguous. I don’t want to be part of a culture that makes people saints. I want to respect them for being people. I don’t want to live in a society where people are encouraged to hate each other, either. That kind of hatred is one of the most corrosive things in existence.

[AjayVMX]

Well thank you Nathan for that crap. 

Once again you have shown clearly that you are NOT one who I would like to be associated with. 

[AjayVMX]

oops!  Sorry, forgot about that Wasp! 

[Nathan S]

Well thank you Nathan for that crap. 

Once again you have shown clearly that you are NOT one who I would like to be associated with. 

Why is that, AJ? One of our country's strong points has been our ability to recognise past mistakes, while taking the positives from them. This is the very core of why the Gallipoli campaign has been our "poster boy" - we were meekly sending our soldiers to be slaughtered with absolutely minimal chance of success, and we did it on the whim of the mother country.
Most other countries would be keen to bury that bit of history out of sheer embarrassment. Instead, we looked at the positives that it displayed - tenacity and resilience, mostly - and embraced it.
Somewhere in the last twenty years, we've lost sight of that, and have instead allowed ourselves to fall into the jingoistic nonsense that ignores our failings as a country, of campaigns and of individuals (in the military sense).

I don’t understand what we hope to gain by dumbing down our history. As the famous quote goes: "Those who forget the past, are condemned to repeat it".