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For the last six or seven years I’ve been trying to work out
why I have lost interest in the ANZAC day memorials. I attended my first when I
was 15 and played in the Municipal band. We played at a Dawn Service and my dad,
a WWII vet, took me down to the war memorial. It would be almost 20 years later
that I spoke to him about his war time ‘adventures’ and found out what his
experience had been.
Within the next ten years I had my own boys and the two oldest ones got involved
in a club that took part in the local street parade each year. We asked poppy if
we could borrow some of his medals to be worn by them. He agreed and the boys
marched in that particularly uncoordinated way children do. It was at that first
march some 15 years ago that I felt a tear in my eye and started to think about
what war meant to those who survived it.
I started some reading and, as mentioned above, I spoke to my dad about what he
experienced. I wanted to understand what the fuss was about and was keen to talk
to my kids about what it was they were taking part in and how powerful an
expression of thanks it was to honour women and men who took up arms to defend
our country.
I started to discover the truth about the ANZAC legend and the wars Australian
service people had died in. I started to find out about the way our governments
treated the widows and families of the dead they supposedly ‘honoured’. I
started to find out about the non-physical injuries our service people carried
and how these injuries tore apart families and how the dying continued in the
garages and back yards and in the cars and off buildings and cliffs and how the
number of war widows and orphans continued to grow long after the last shots had
been fired.
And then along came the Howard government.
There is no denying that Howard is a populist. Any balanced and reasonable
commentator or political observer will tell you this. He is a man blown about by
the winds of fortune and change as much as he is, as some describe him, a
‘cunning’ politician. One of the first moves by the Howard government was to
open up the ANZAC day memorials to a form of insidious privatisation. I’ll try
and explain what I mean.
Howard’s agenda is not at all removed from the neo-conservative push being
resisted around the globe. This ideology believes that each of us is solely
responsible for our own lives. These neocons believe that if you’re born into
poverty then there is nothing a society can do to help you. You must get out of
your poverty solely by applying yourself to moving up the economic ladder (sound
familiar?). This same philosophy applies to every aspect of our individual
lives.
These neo-conservatives are not stupid. Far from it. They know how ridiculous
this sounds. In order to take our minds off thinking about how ridiculous their
proposals are, they try and find ways of distracting us. The three main ways of
doing this are highlighting crime, sex and nationalism. They embark on literal
crusades against crime and rail about ‘deviant’ sexuality, be it homosexuality,
youth sexuality, pensioner sexuality or whatever. If all that fails they turn to
nationalism, the most destructive of all tendencies among societies.
But here they face another dilemma. They have told us for so long “there is no
such thing as society”, to quote Lady Thatcher, that we almost believe them. Our
so called leaders have told us that the only ones who think in terms of society
are ‘lefties’ and ‘radicals’ and other nefarious types who will, if we allow
them, break into our houses (crime), rape (sex) our women and burn our flag
(nationalism). In short, its only bad people who think in terms of society.
Having convinced enough of us to keep voting them back in, Howard’s bunch had to
find a way of ‘uniting’ us even though their campaign and policies are about
dividing us. To achieve this end they had to find something that crossed state
borders and tapped into the basic good within us. They had to find something, to
use the psychoanalytic term, by which to sublimate our needs. That is, to
provide some new form of activity that would distract us from our real need.
ANZAC provides just the right amount of ‘goodness’ and nostalgia to become
something by which Howard wanted to define himself.
Seeing himself as Churchillian type leader, Howard unleashed the chains, not
only of the GST, but also of the ‘creatives’ in the PR and image management
industry to have a go at ‘modernising’ ANZAC. What has evolved over the last few
years is the bastard child that on the one hand wants to convince us that war is
peace and on the other, that to not embrace the remembrance of war is to be
unpatriotic. Orwell would be proud of what is being attempted as our collective
consciousness is sucked down the memory hole and burnt to a cinder.
It was only this ANZAC day that it finally dawned on me why I had lost interest
in attending the memorials. It was when I saw a McDonald’s ad featuring the most
egregious display of corporate sentimentalism I have ever seen. I watched this
ad with my jaw literally on the ground and realised that the sacred had been
turned into the profane, that ANZAC was now a fully commercialised venture.
What? Do you mean they’ll soon be charging all those ‘wonderful young
Australians’, who John Howard says he wont have a bad word said against them, an
entrance fee to access Lone Pine and Anzac cove? You betcha. When we allow the
memory of a society to be sold for crass commercialism we really need to ask
ourselves some questions!
Howard keeps banging on about how the memory of the ‘diggers’ is what we should
focus on but in his speech at Gallipoli on ANZAC day he gave away something that
shows how committed he is to not honouring the memory of the dead he so often
refers to. He said, “the spirit of ANZAC … lives on through a nation’s easy
familiarity, through Australians looking out for each other, through courage and
compassion in the face of adversity”. But here’s the twist. This is only
applicable when we’re ‘over there’.
As far as Howard is concerned we can’t be allowed to focus on the misery and
deprivation that hundreds of thousands of Australians face each day due to the
policies implemented by his government. We can,t focus on the grief and anger of
veteran’s families denied compensation for death or injury caused by military
misdeed. We can’t be allowed to focus on the disintegration of our society in
the face of the privatisation of everything. We can’t speak about the loss of
our national soul under the impost of the dollar. That’s why I have become
disillusioned with the memorial of ANZAC day.
It was 30 years ago this last ANZAC day that I attended my first dawn memorial
service. It was around 15 years ago that my sons first marched in a street
parade on ANZAC day and about 10 years ago that I spoke, for the first time,
with my dad about his experience in WWII. But now all I do is feel empty. I want
to understand what it was like for the diggers. I want to embrace these men and
women and tell them how grateful I am. I want them to be able to tell me how
they feel and what it is they fought for.
I think I would be right in saying that most of them fought to make our nation
safe and a better place to bring up their kids. I think I would also be right in
saying they certainly didn’t fight to allow the commercialisation of their
memory to be aided and abetted by their elected representatives. I wonder if we,
those of us still young enough, have the true “spirit of ANZAC” and will do what
Howard says we should do and fight to make sure that we look out for the war
widows and their families. And not only them but also the poor, the disabled and
the downtrodden. After all, if that’s what the diggers fought for, shouldn’t
that be the ANZAC legend we’re supposed to embrace?