ANZAC Comrade

I vow to thee, My Country

I first posted this nearly two years ago. It feels as if we are inching ever closer to explicit war with certain commentators espousing the glory of making the ultimate sacrifice for the State (versus Your Country). In today’s context, I thought it worth reposting…

“Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak and esteem to all.” George Washington

I went to my first ANZAC Parade. Compared to what you might see in a comparable English community, it was incredibly well-supported. Upliftingly so. Spectators across all age groups thronged the pavements as kids from the surrounding schools performed a walk-past. The same kids joined in the subsequent hour-long service. Donations, announcements and messages were read out from a long list of local clubs, societies and groups.

The bag pipes haunted. The Last Stand scoured the soul.

The mounted ANZACs exuded an air of mournful pride.

But, as always at such remembrance services, I couldn’t shake my awkward discomfort.

First, and more glibly, these events should not be so long and tedious. The list of organisations needing to be seen to support the event is so long as to lose value. However, much like a funeral can/should be a celebration of a life well lived, so a remembrance day could be a happy honouring of the freedoms secured by those that put their lives and bodies at risk.

Second, less glibly, the last few years have caused me to question received wisdom in more and more areas. I read The Phony War, whose legitimate hypothesis stated that the British spent most of WWII waiting to be of any use but, in order to be seen to be doing something in the meantime, ended up carpet-bombing (under the command of “Bomber Harris”) German civilians under the propaganda of demoralising the general population.

My current understanding of WWI’s Gallipoli is that the military strategists at the time knew that the Turkish landing would end up in a bloodbath. Indeed, they treated it as a necessary sacrifice to provide a decoy so as to open up another front.

I need to do more work on this, if the untainted historical information is at all discernible (I have on order: Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War).

However, the more one looks, the more one sees that soldiers in the Great Wars were too often pawns on a chessboard…expendable units in a detached game where the ends justify the means.

This is where I struggle with intertwined feelings of loss, respect, regret…and of consternation, anger and retribution.

What were the lies that were told? Why were those lies told? I still think there are good reasons to believe that WWI and WWII were justifiably fought for freedom. For the freedom of families to live in their communities on the land that they loved.

The reshaping of the World Order after WWII may well have been an inevitable consequence of the tectonic shifts in economic and military might that ran parallel to the hideous conflicts that metastasised in Europe and linked arms with North Asia.

However, the events of WWII were certainly steered by the US to lay its foundation as global hegemon from 1945 to the present day.

What is even clearer, is that the wantonly destructive wars of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were utterly avoidable abominations, the justifications for which were built on deceptions. I cannot imagine plumbing the depths of darkness experienced by parents who had to watch their sons and daughters co-opted under the banner of the State to form part of such historical atrocities…at the behest of Messrs Bush and Blair.

And this is my internal dichotomy. There is something fundamentally and inestimably honourable underpinning a man’s willingness to lay down his life for his battalion, family and community…for their freedom to live on the land that they love.

I have experienced only a microscopic nano-sliver of that profound feeling of comradery (on a rugby pitch, where your own physical safety is exposed, dependent on your teammate putting their corresponding wellbeing on the line and at your shoulder). However, I sense it is a primeval driving force embedded into our DNA over millennia of protecting our tribe. Evolution has seen to it that some will lay down their lives for others to continue the broader lineage.

Brothers in Arms.

However, it is also self-evident that this visceral, binding force has been commandeered for the purposes of evil. How else do you explain mass formations of soldiers sacrificing their lives for what is plainly evil (the Nazis is the obvious example, but there are plenty, plenty more)?

How are we to differentiate between this honourable, selfless, ultimate instinct being for good or for bad? One of the speakers at the ANZAC parade made it very clear that he elided the sacrifices of WWI and WWII with those of Iraq and Afghanistan.

I only recently read Murray Rothbart’s Anatomy of the State and a line therein gave me a clarity of thought that was new. Historically, peoples belonged to the land. Despotic, kind, tyrannical, generous leaders and their enforcers would come and go along with the conflicts generating those transitions. But the people would stay. Stay on the land, the land that they loved. And put up with whichever power-hungry, parasitic ruling class was then in position. The only time that they would actually fight would be if there was a threat to them of being removed from their homeland.

So, my point is this: we should only ever fight for our freedom. Freedom for us and our communities to live on the land that we call home. Never for “The State” per se.

States co-opt one of our most viscerally human instincts for their own purposes.

Distressingly – especially in the current environment – many think that The State and the population’s interests are aligned. I think they are more often fundamentally opposed.

When we say we think it is right to fight for our country, we should think very carefully about the true meaning of Our Country.

Lest we forget.