ANZAC Day

Happy Anzac Day, or sad, whichever way you feel. Beyond a momentary gratitude that thousands of diggers died so we could have a public holiday, Anzac Day tends to stir a bit of ambivalence in me.

Charges of glorifying war are, in my opinion, definitely valid - albeit not entirely. Hell, I see my Nana doing it all the time, and I don't blame her, not really. The War was - and is - the defining event of her life. Nothing like it was ever before or since. When she talks about the war, there's a life and interest in her eyes that few other things these days can summon.

And of course people want to glorify war. The idea that the sacrifice and death was meaningless, base, political and unnecessary is anathema to them, and that's not surprising.

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And yet, it is meaningless. To pretend that Anzac Day is anything but a shiny bit of spackle - gloss on the skull bones of humanity - is such a wilful act of misdirection and denial it's almost breathtaking.

Yes, war is hell, and yet so many of our world leaders - and citizens, and media - seem to view it as a necessary hell. A hell that is perhaps not such a bad thing, so long as we see it only on the horizon, a blood-red glow to the sunset.

Whilst heads were bowed today, eyes blinking away sleep before filling courageously with tears, heads on the other side of the world were being blown up.

These people are victims of war. They did not volunteer, they were conscripted to battle. And they remember, not those who died fifty years ago, but those who died yesterday, without a choice, without even the benefit of thinking they were fighting "evil", or to save the world, or some ridiculous such.

Whilst we piously thud our hands into our chests, thinking of "the horror, the horror", and the noble innocents who died to fight it, we are myopically ignoring our own bloody fingerprints on a chain of corpses that stretch from Iraq and Sudan, to Chechnya and Burma, and many, many other places.

If John Howard truly believed in the message of Anzac Day, he wouldn't have sent soldiers to Iraq, and those soldiers wouldn't have gone. This bullshit, following-orders/ we're-just- the-grunts mentality has a simple name, it's called the Nuremburg Defence, and it didn't work for Keitel and Jodl, and it shouldn't work for anyone.

Instead we hear about "mateship", and "the Anzac spirit" - whatever the hell that is; blindly following orders in a battle you can't win?

If we really believed war was hell, there wouldn't have been an Iraq, or a Vietnam, or a Korea. More importantly: there shouldn't be an Iraq, or a Vietnam or Korea. That is the true message of Anzac Day.

The inscription Lest We Forget conjures a bitter laugh in my throat. Lest We Forget? How, possibly, could we forget, when we are reminded of it every day? The banal, exploitation of war.

The victims, headless, armless; tortured. Blown up, and torn to shreds by shrapnel, land mines, cluster bombs, and mortars. The political expedience of it; the grubbiness, the money and calculated profit scrawled across our papers, annual reports and tv screens every night of the week.

Lest we forget? Ha, how could we possibly forget when we have never stopped to remember? War is not just hell, it is madness; a blank screaming face, incoherently bellowing for eternity. It's easy to shed a tear, easy as pulling a trigger. That's what we should remember about Anzac Day. The struggle not to kill. There's a cause worth fighting for.