Merry ANZAC Day
To me, hearing wide eyed children tell TV cameras at dawn services that the soldiers ‘died for our freedom’ seems to miss the point of ANZAC Day. Do we not gather to promise our young people that we would never, ever throw away their precious lives on wasteless wars the way we did so delightfully in our past? That as NZers we have grown up and will no longer feed the dogs of war with the lives of our brightest and youngest – and that when we do go to war it is ALWAYS for the right reasons that we ask younger generations to lay their lives down, and never simply to please an overseas power.
You would think that the historical slaughter of our fellow countrymen, so much so that their bodies rise above us and blot out the sun, would be enough of a mental image to ward us against any type of cheap romanticized nationalism, but the lack of any critique of our rush to war suggests sadly we will ignore that image of a broken mountain of corpses, cheering our war dead as they coldly stare back at us. In our desperate fumbling for a national identity let's not forget the deep human tragedy the reality of war is and how hard we must fight to not fight, I think our commemoration should be to the human tragedy of war, it is only by recognizing this that we guard against being led so easily to war in the future and we fulfill our promise to the next Generation while truly respecting the loss of the past.
posted by Bomber @ 8:09 am
10 comments
10 Comments:
They have replaced dying at war - where at least they may have had some pride, concern for others and even achieved somthing - with death by murder, drugs, obesity, crazy driving, crime, smoking ...... doesn't seem like progress to me.
Medallion of Quixote to Tumeke’s Pictorialist here above
Tumeke’s graphic artist and Pictorialist is the best .... Some of the pictures are frightening, some are funny but always they have tremendous wallop. It is with pleasure that we award the Spanish Gold for this [ to me ] unknown genius.
Specific commendation is Savagery and Perspicacity.
Perspicacity is a new word we found in the dictionary last night ... The medallion will impart strength, and clarity more to the Artists work.
The Medallion of Quixote may be observed and uplifted from my site:
It is heavy, pure spanish gold:
http://peterquixote.blogspot.com/
PQ: Thank you for your commendation. We are both honoured and humbled by the acknowledgment. I will accept your award for our blog, but it must be made clear that most of the images are from Mr Bradbury's hunting and foraging rather than from our own design. Therefore this award will be used as an encouragement for us to generate more original images in the future.
Kia ora.
I have heard that many people come to you site, even senior politicians, to learn things, this is interesting
Our fine young men got send to some faraway country to die ther for sweet f!ck all.
Thats what sucks.
What are the correct reasons to go to war guys? Its never right. if we had to fight the nazis im sure youd have an argument against it. sometimes we just need to fight to keep our way of life.
We took the finest out of our gene pool, then we breed from the halt the lame & the gassed.
Mankind has been doing this from time immemorial.
If you keep killing the best & breeding from the rest you can't complain about the outcome.
The true heroes of the first world war were men like Archibald Baxter.
"Sometimes we just need to fight to keep our way of life"???
You are kidding right, anon? And what is 'our' way of life? Seems to me that WW1 and WW2 kept the rich capitalists in their arms factories rich, and kept the poor working class stiffs...well, stiff as a board in their coffins.
The trick is to not glorify war, nor to build natinalistic fervour about militarism, so that when Hitler figures arise, they are rejected by the populace.
Recall WW2 was mostly caused by the Germans embracing Hitler as a way out of the oppresive Versailles treaty reparations for WW1, which was an imperial war over territory (East Europe to Central Asia - preceded by Crimean wars, etc). So these conflicts tend to snowball unless rejected firmly.
This is emphasised by what we see in the Mid-East today, with Bush-Bush wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fuelling decades of conflict through the whole region and world.
Surely Anzac day is the perfect time to hiughlight the futility (and profitability for some) of war?
i'm sure that wars are manufactured to keep some fat arms dealer & his mates getting fatter. I am absolutely sure of it.
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