Three years ahead of time, our Prime Minister is already making preparations to mark the centenary of the Gallipoli landing. The ANZAC legend is of such national importance that setting aside $80 million seems entirely appropriate, or maybe even inadequate, to do it justice. In a press release on ANZAC day (2012) we are told that competitions for school children have been planned so that a select group of young Australians might have the opportunity to make the pilgrimage to Turkey for this momentous occasion. But what are we remembering?
The Gallipoli landing of 1915 was a horrendous military disaster that resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Australian and New Zealand troops in defence of the British Empire on the beaches of far off Gallipoli. Our troops went to The Great War with the intent of killing rather than dying, they were not defending Australia, and many of the Diggers who survived trench warfare on the Western front came home shell shocked and maimed and never recovered from the horrors of that time. Yet, interestingly, the modern ANZAC legend seems remarkably uninterested in these historical facts.
An estimated 200 million people died in wars in the 20th century. The horror and indiscriminate destruction of modern warfare was indelibly imprinted on the combatants and victims of modern war who knew it directly. Further, as P.W. Singer chillingly documents in Wired for War, we have seen a revolution in robotic warfare in the 21st century that that would now make a global war an even greater bloodbath than anything we saw last century. Yet the modern ANZAC legend seems quite forgetful of the barbarity, the idiocy, the wanton violence and destruction of modern war.
The ANZAC legend we now commemorate is one of the nobility of self-sacrifice in order to uphold the freedom and peace of the Australian nation. The ANZAC spirit upholds the nobility of ultimate sacrifice and the glory of having a cause to fight and die for that is bigger than one’s own personal interests. In a bizarre twist of reconstructive nationalist sentiment, we seem to have forgotten why modern war happens, what it is really like and why propagandas of military glory are so deceptive and dangerous. Perhaps, even, ANZAC day is now a state sanctioned public cult designed specifically to prevent us from remembering what war is actually all about. So as the bugle sounds, as the spirit of nationalistic martial pride swells in our breast, as legendary heroes of bravery surge forward in our imagination, we should beware lest we remember what really happens in modern war.
Lest we remember…
Since the mid-1990s the “ANZAC legend” has become increasingly identified as the crucial story defining our national identity. ANZAC day now provides us – and particularly young people – with a spiritual horizon and a religious event that gives meaning and a higher sense of purpose to our lives. I was a secondary school chaplain in the 1990s and I remember very clearly the transition which occurred from ANZAC day being a non-event in the early 90s to it being a semi-religious civic occasion which young people in particular were drawn to by the turn of the century. And let us not forget that dawn services are indeed public religious events. The manner in which the Christian religion has always played chaplain to the nation’s military establishment means that churches have largely embraced the new ANZAC mythos with relish, and largely participate in our public war liturgies without question.
The new ANZAC mythos had its birth at around the same time that the Howard government set about ‘reviving’ (creating? revising?) a defining set of specific national identity markers. Howard’s neo-conservative ‘Australian values’ sought to unify us as a nation and set us apart from other people (particularly Asians) as noble and rightly proud of our free way of life. After 9/11, this public spirituality of ‘Australian values’ locked in on the ANZAC mythos with a passion. For now we believe that our noble and free way of life is under external threat and this threat will requires militant courage do deflect. Our young people must be nurtured in a preparedness to use and suffer violence in the defence of Australia. Interestingly, there has been no let-up in this Howard inspired youth focused militant trend after the ALP came to power, as the Gillard ANZAC centenary plans strongly attest.
Marion Maddox’s God Under Howard (2005) and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds’ What’s Wrong with ANZAC? (2010) are important studies analysing how neo-conservative ‘Australian values’ and the ‘legend of ANZAC’ came into our recent collective psyche. Any serious reading in this area makes it clear that our new nationalist militarism is deeply at odds with Christ’s response to the violence of the powers of this world, and has no solid grounding in the actual events of Australian history. Further, Richard Koenigsberg’s Nations Have a Right to Kill (2009) is something anyone interested war should read carefully. Koenigsberg points out that the modern nation functions as a secular god – nations give individuals meaning which transcend their own ego and, in war, they demand ultimate loyalty – that requires periodic blood sacrifices. Koenigsberg is not, as far as I know, religious himself, but his careful analysis of how modern war propaganda works and what beliefs it is premised on should give any Christian serious cause to pause. The Christian should ask whether it is possible to be a Christian and also uphold nationalistic militantism. Most foundationally, it is the idolatry of the nation state’s claims for total loyalty, total sacrifice, that the Christian cannot accept.
So let us remember what modern war is really like. It is a Dionysian ecstasy of violence, bloodshed and destruction. It is deeply tangled in the idolatrous claims of the modern nation state to total allegiance and total sacrifice. Further, in times of religious banality the spirituality of military glory is an easy substitute for real religion to young people starved of any depth of belief and loyalty. In a time of increasing geo-political instability, the glorification of soldiers is the sure early sign of the ratchetting up of war propaganda to properly condition the next generation of sacrificial lambs who will be offered up on the alter of violence to the nation state – even our own children. Let us remember these things and give pause to reflect on them. Let us not forget what really happened at Gallipoli.
