April 24, 2010
If Anzac Day is for many Australians a true and authentic national day---a cathartic moment of Australian nationhood---then Anzac Day has been captured by a new form of nationalism - all the flag waving, the kids chanting ''Aussie, Aussie, Aussie'' and wearing stick-on flag tattoos that often turns into a jingoism that supports military intervetions overseas.
What puzzles me is the celebration of Gallipoli, which represents military disaster for the British Empire, rather than Kokoda, which represents blocking the Japanese advance and the defence of the homeland.
In the National Times Martin Flanagan rightly says that:
the Anzacs didn't die protecting Australia from being invaded. Rather, we were invading a country on the other side of the world - to wit, Turkey - with whom we had no difference as a people outside the larger politics of the day.
Surely the celebration at Gallipoli represents a love of country that is misplaced; it is distorted because it represents fighting another country's wars in a foreign land that does not threaten Australia at all. As such it represents the militarisation of Australian history by the conservatives.
An earlier example of Australia participating in, rather than avoiding, foreign wars fought to further the interests of the British Empire is the Boer War (1899-1902). Instead of remaining neutral, the six Australian colonies and then the new commonwealth government sent thousands of troops to fight alongside the British forces against the two Boer republics. Crazy. Yet Gallipoli and the memorialisation of the first world war, is now a bloated media event. Solemnity has become sentimentality; banality has triumphed over profundity in the contemplation of sacrifice.
In The AustralianTim Soutphommasane writes:
Yet it would be superficial to renounce the Anzac tradition, or even to believe that all things Anzac must involve jingoistic fervour. Equally, it is wrong to believe that any trace of myth must invalidate the Anzac story.To be a nation is to have a common memory of great deeds that inspires citizens to perform still more....At its best, the Anzac legend isn't a narrow myth about military prowess or the virile manhood of an Australian race. One needn't have had a forebear who fought on the Western Front or at Gallipoli in order to engage with the tradition.Rather, the Anzac legend can be an inclusive and unifying story. It symbolises an ethos of egalitarianism and mateship that animates our national life. It serves to remind us that when we are at our best, we are prepared to think about something greater than ourselves, to place duty above interest.
Fair enough. But why Gallipoli not Kokoda?
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I suspect this is frightfully unfashionable, but....
As part of my routine, I check the smh.com site a couple of times a day. So... I am utterly sick and fekking tired of the juvenile ANZAC chest-thumping of the last few days. Holy cow, sometimes it seems like we are trying to outdo America in it's WORST aspects. Is this some sort of "small man syndrome"? Are we trying to make up for some shortcoming we'd rather not talk about? Oh shit... it's a truly pathetic sight....