ANZAC Day

[miriam_e]

Shouldn't such a day be one where we commemorate how Australia and New Zealand are committed to help each other out no matter what comes?

Instead it has become perverted into celebration and glorification of a war that is the antithesis of anything good or heroic: Gallipoli.

Enormous numbers of kids got sent to the wrong beach to invade a country that had nothing to do with us in order to provide a diversion for the British who were not even really using it. The British command were so unconcerned that they didn't bother to see if it was the right place. The Australian command were so conditioned to jump when ordered to do so by their lords and masters that none of them seemed to question it. The kids who were the cannon fodder, who were slaughtered there, just blindly went to their doom.

Those who were the chain of command were such moral cowards that they didn't question the orders. They didn't ask "how does murdering hundreds of kids help anyone here?" They were apparently so lacking in understanding that they couldn't see that you can't invade from the foot of cliffs topped by machine guns -- morons!

What gets me most is that this appalling waste of life was carried out in the service of something almost evil: we were attempting to invade another country. Nobody has given me any reason why we would have been justified in invading Turkey at that point. (There probably was a reason, but given all the other stuff-ups of the situation, I don't have a lot of confidence that it would be a good reason.)

Gallipoli should be remembered as something that should never be repeated. It should be written large as why war is such a terrible mistake: unquestioned obedience to moronic commands, massive loss of life in the pursuit of a nasty error.

I think Gallipoli has been built up into a hero thing precisely because those in command can't bear to have people think about the massive stupidity that it really represents.

The worst part of it all is all the kids who were murdered, who should have been leading happy lives back home falling in love and living lives their parents could be truly proud of.

Comments

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I think you are right. I seriously doubt that anybody connected with that war will admit how appallingly unnecessary it was and how the kids who died in it were duped. But I don't know how many of them had noble intentions. Based on what I've heard old-timers say in the past and my astonished conversations with present-day kids I think most of them went to war because they thought it would be cool and fun to beat the crap out of the other side.

That way of thinking needs to be defused if we are ever to have a peaceful future. It is that kind of belligerent niavete that politicians and military recruiters manipulate.