Th street where I grew up in Sydney was a war street. There were long silences, then the smashing of glass and screams. Pete and I played Aussies-and-Japs. Pete's father was an object of awe. He weighed barely 100 pounds and shook with malaria and was frequently demented. He would sit in a cane chair, drunk, scything the air with the sword of a Japanese soldier he said he had killed. There was a woman who flitted from room to room, always red-eyed and fearful, it seemed. She was like many mothers in the street. Wally, another mate, lived in a house that was always dark because the black-out blinds had not been taken down. His father had been 'killed by the Japs'. Once, when Wally's mother came home, she found he had got a gun, put it in his mouth and blown his head off. It was a war street.
The insidious, merciless, life-long damage of war taught many of us to recognise the difference between the empty symbolism of war and the actual meaning. 'Does it matter'? mocked the poet Siegfried Sassoon at the end of an earlier slaughter, in 1918, as he grieved his younger brother's death at Gallipoli. I grew up with that name, Gallipoli. The British assault on the Turkish Dardanelles was one of the essential crimes of imperial war, causing the death and wounding of 392,000 on all sides. The Australian and New Zealander losses were among the highest, proportionally; and 25 April, 1915 was declared not just a day of remembrance but the 'birth of the Australian nation'. This was based on the belief of Edwardian militarists that true men were made in war, an absurdity about to be celebrated yet again.
Anzac Day has been appropriated by those who manipulate the cult of state violence - militarism - in order to satisfy a psychopathic deference to foreign power and to pursue its aims. And the 'legend' has no room for the only war fought on Australian soil: that of the Aboriginal people against the European invaders. In a land of cenotaphs, not one stands for them. Read the full Article at Global Research
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