War has had its day
It's ANZAC Day once again.
Years ago, when I was a single-digit age, I attended the ANZAC Day parade through the city streets here in Brisbane. As I waved my little Aussie flag, an ABC journalist and cameraman appeared in front of me. The female journalist asked something along the lines of: "What does ANZAC Day mean to you?"
I replied: "It's a very special day and I think we should be proud of the people who were in the war for us, and who fought for our country."
(It appeared on the news that night.)
It is, I continue to believe, a significant day and it is imperative that we are thankful for what our servicemen and women have done. We must also always try to understand exactly what they went through.
I for one also believe that ANZAC Day should be used as an opportunity for a collective realisation of the stupidity of war: humans killing humans. There really should be no place for war in the 21st century. If you just sit and think about what war actually is, it becomes extremely difficult to fathom how any human being could possibly be supportive of it. How the Iraq invasion has any supporters at all is beyond my comprehension. Maybe someone can explain it to me. People who are just like us are killed in war. Entire families are wiped out. Lives, as important as our own, are taken away in the name of who-knows-what.
It's very idealistic of me, I realise that. But please, can't we learn our lesson? War is bad. It is backward. It is outdated. The concept would be comical if it weren't so serious.
Years ago, when I was a single-digit age, I attended the ANZAC Day parade through the city streets here in Brisbane. As I waved my little Aussie flag, an ABC journalist and cameraman appeared in front of me. The female journalist asked something along the lines of: "What does ANZAC Day mean to you?"
I replied: "It's a very special day and I think we should be proud of the people who were in the war for us, and who fought for our country."
(It appeared on the news that night.)
It is, I continue to believe, a significant day and it is imperative that we are thankful for what our servicemen and women have done. We must also always try to understand exactly what they went through.
I for one also believe that ANZAC Day should be used as an opportunity for a collective realisation of the stupidity of war: humans killing humans. There really should be no place for war in the 21st century. If you just sit and think about what war actually is, it becomes extremely difficult to fathom how any human being could possibly be supportive of it. How the Iraq invasion has any supporters at all is beyond my comprehension. Maybe someone can explain it to me. People who are just like us are killed in war. Entire families are wiped out. Lives, as important as our own, are taken away in the name of who-knows-what.
It's very idealistic of me, I realise that. But please, can't we learn our lesson? War is bad. It is backward. It is outdated. The concept would be comical if it weren't so serious.
posted by Anthony Stoddart @ 1:00 PM
2 Comments:
At Tue Apr 25, 08:46:00 PM,
Sarah said…
Every ANZAC day my mum would walk with me, my little brother and the family dog to watch the ANZAC parade and the memorial. She told us that when she was a kid (early 1960s) no-one made a big deal about ANZAC day; no-one wanted to know about it.
As a nurse, she briefly worked in a psychiatric hospital with world war (I & II, I think) veterans who were permanently mentally incapacitated by their war experience- this would have been in the mid 1970s, and she found it very disturbing. No-one wanted to know about them either.
It's rare to find a veteran of the first or second world war who had a single good thing to say about war, and not just because they've reached that age where they're dying like flies. Almost without exception they say that war is something to be avoided whenever possible. It has always bothered me that John Howard and others like him are all too eager to get us into new wars- especially when they know that they and the people they love are at no risk of being called to fight. To me, these people (who ineviteably make a point of being photographed at ANZAC Day services) show no respect for the veterans who thought they could teach us something, who thought they could prevent what happened to them and to their mates who never survived the war from happening to another generation of young men.
ANZAC Day is a sad day for anyone who hoped that we might have learned a lesson from the wars Australians fought in.
At Tue May 02, 11:12:00 PM,
Anonymous said…
great post Anth!! so true - the last sentence in particular
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