Anzac Day 2022

Anzac Day is today, an enforced celebration of the senseless death of so many Australians, where no criticism is permitted of the ‘coming of age’ myth. Anzac Day celebrations almost died out, along with the surviving First World War diggers, but today one faces hostility, even physical assault, should one dare question the meaning and relevancy, the glorification of violence, masculinity and the worst versions of mateship.

Every person has the right to defend themselves, but no war, even a ‘just’ war, has ever been fought without atrocities  –the victor excuses their own, the defeated suffer theirs as justifications.

Anzac Day supposedly ‘honours and respects those served’. But what is this service? Not in the last 75 years, since the end of the Second World War, has Australia ever faced a demonstrable threat to its own security that justified the invasion of another country, and yet Australian military has fought in many countries. How can it be then that Australia has fought so many wars in that time?

The Afghanistan War is an interesting example. That war was plainly against international law (and as an acknowledgment of that, the war-mongering so-called democracies now don’t cite international law, but a vague “rules based international order”, which enables them to pseudo-justify any action). Such observations of the illegality of any Afghanistan invasion were available at the time, but were derided or ignored. But either the invasion was consistent with international law or not, and it clearly wasn’t.

Should I honour and respect those that served in an illegal war? No.  To me, the Australian military are pathetic and manipulated figures, let off the leash by a wholly contemptible political class, craven people who send others to fight and kill. Hundreds of thousands of people protested in Australia before the war, citing the illegality, but Australia still went to war, tho there was no threat to Australia, and the war would be illegal. Where was the much-lauded ‘rule of law’?

Australian Prime Minister John Howard sent Australia to war in Afghanistan, and to war in Iraq too, even after being advised by Australian experts that there were no WMDs. Yet he deliberately lied to the Australian people and used WMDs as the justification for war. This is an unforgiveable deception, and Howard is a war criminal. War by so-called democracies now is not self-defense based, it is merely an expression of political or financial motivations, wholly determined by a political class obsessed with graft and corruption, and propagandized by a complicit media.

This is now Anzac Day. The political class (acting in their own self-interest and the interests of elites) solemnize the deaths of hapless and ignorant Australians who fought and died, because they need others to continue to fight and die. It took 2 decades of continued agitation for the Australian government to agree to hold an enquiry into the high rate of suicide by serving and former military. Do you see the feigned concern of the elites? Hapless and ignorant soldiers indeed, and those that send them to war offer mostly contempt to those that do their bidding.

The Anzac Oath:

 “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; 
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. 
At the going down of the sun and in the morning 
We will remember them.”

There would be descendants of those that have fought and died who lay in their filth in aged care homes, who are orphans shuffled between foster homes, who die waiting for an ambulance or an operation, who will never be able to afford a house of their own, who study in underfunded public schools, and such like. We will remember them? Really?  A soldier may kill for a country, but they die for something more: their family, their comrades, for a principle, a future they won’t have, but want for others. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is merely a lie told by elites to the fighters on the way to slaughter. If the fallen were truly remembered, Australia today would be a very different place.

Conservative politicians in Australia are now spruiking the ‘China menace’, that China is a threat to Australia, even that there’ll be war with China soon! Two things I know: one, the political class obfuscate, deceive, and lie; and two, the answer to the question: how many times this century has Australian and Chinese forces fought in other countries? The answer to that question is that Australia is clearly the war-monger.

Now, obedient democratic Australian,  wave your flag for the Anzac Day parade, but it is your political masters you honour. And you never ever learn from your previous mistakes.