The Endless War on Anzac

The destruction of Anzac Day and the ruination of the Anzac tradition; nothing would give the Left greater pleasure. This is especially the case in the light of their success in destroying Australia Day, the headway they have made in subverting the entire premise of the Australian War Memorial, and their desire to recover their momentum after the failure of “the Voice”. Anzac Day now stands alone on the calendar as a symbolic bastion of national identity, an identity the Left wants expunged not only to create further room for its ever-growing collection of ersatz days of pride and mourning, but also to realise its goal of creating a cultural tabula rasa that can be re-engineered according to progressivist ideology.

This has been a long campaign, which I described in Anzac and its Enemies: The History War on Australia’s National Identity (2015). It is part of the Culture Wars dating back to the final years of the Great War, and the start of the onslaught on liberal democracy waged ever since by totalitarian, theocratic and kleptocratic regimes. Its present phase dates back to the era of the Vietnam War, the 1960s Cultural Revolution, and the rise of the New Left. Primarily an expression of the intelligentsia, the New Left oversaw the shift in the Left’s search for a revolutionary subject capable of overthrowing liberal democratic society. It abandoned the working class, which it concluded had become reactionary, and turned instead towards marginalised and subaltern groups, in accordance with the neo-Marxist theories of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse had decided that the new revolutionary subject would be a coalition of the anti-war and Black Power movements, student radicalism, feminism and environmentalism, and this alliance was shortly joined by the Gay Rights movement and other identity-based groups. The shift was therefore from class politics to identity politics, and this has since become the dominant form of radicalism in Western societies, and is now pivotal in the war to destroy Anzac.

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This shift was accompanied by the adoption of the neo-Marxist concept of hegemony, introduced by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, about whom the Australian New Left has been extremely enthusiastic. According to this strategy, the revolution was to be won in the realm of culture and needed to proceed in two phases: the war of position, followed by the war of manoeuvre.

The first phase involves the infiltration of sympathetic cadres into influential, elite positions throughout society, especially in education, media and culture, where the campaign to impose a “revolutionary consciousness” takes place. This was famously named “the long march through the institutions” by the pre-eminent New Left theorist, the German Rudi Dutschke, and was endorsed by Marcuse as “the only effective way forward” for contemporary revolutionaries. In Australia the New Left’s “long march” was exemplified by the takeover of the ABC, and by the notorious character assassination and forced retirement of Geoffrey Blainey from the University of Melbourne in the 1980s, followed by the elevation into Blainey’s professorial chair of the leader of this campaign, Stuart Macintyre, a communist and leading creature of the Australian New Left, who went on to dominate the profession, direction, portrayal and teaching of Australian history and of Anzac for the next three decades.

The second phase of this strategy begins once these positions and the necessary ideological victories have been secured, and involves moving to a direct attack on key cultural targets considered to be the mainstays of the liberal democratic system, such as the Bicentennial, Australia Day and Anzac Day. As we saw in 2023, proponents of the Voice and the subversion of the Constitution were confident that their hold on elite positions would deliver them victory in accordance with this strategy, but they failed through arrogance, complacency and the ineptitude of their leadership cadre.

The denigration of the Anzac tradition has been going on for over a century, ever since Anzac and the personal and social ideals associated with it emerged as an iconic symbol at the end of the Great War. During that cataclysmic conflict some 420,000 Australians served in the military, 332,000 of them overseas. Over 61,000 lost their lives and about 156,000 were wounded, gassed or taken prisoner, a casualty rate of almost 65 per cent, one of the highest of any nation in the war. Reeling before the scale of this loss, our young country sought some vision of a noble future that would give meaning to the massive sacrifice the nation had made.

“Anzac”, at its source, in the wartime writings of Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and especially Charles Bean, came to signify a specific set of personal characteristics exhibited by Australian soldiers at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. These characteristics—which include courage, tenacity, stoicism, egalitarianism, resourcefulness, and mateship above all—shouldn’t need reciting, and the crucial factor in the emergence of the Anzac Legend was not the mere coincidence of such characteristics, but the way they were welded together to create a empowering spirit. And this spirit was not an abstract quality but a visceral feeling, an acutely alert state of mind, and a resolute style of behaviour that emerged in the ghastly cauldron of war as men charged into fearsome enemy fire, while their mates around them were blown apart and flung into the dust and mud.

At Gallipoli, each of the young men of the Federation generation knew this was a fate they faced, and so each confronted a great personal challenge as they assembled on Anzac Cove and gazed up towards the Turkish positions burrowed away in the scrub in the heights above. As Bean observed: “They had come at last to the ancient test; and in the mind of each man was the question—how would they react to it.” And what he saw in their collective response were the lineaments of a defining national identity, asking rhetorically in The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918:

How did this nation, bred in complete peace, largely undisciplined except for strongly British tradition and the self-discipline necessary for men who grapple with nature, react to what still has to be recognised as the supreme test for fitness to exist?

After what he witnessed he knew that “the big thing in the war for Australia was a discovery of the character of Australians. It was character which rushed the hills at Gallipoli and held on there.” He was convinced that it was in the bravery, resolve and self-sacrifice of those young men that “the consciousness of Australian nationhood” was born on the April 25, 1915. And it is this, above all, that Anzac Day commemorates.

The most recent sustained attempt to destroy Anzac was mounted systematically in the quarter-century following the Left’s undermining of Australia’s Bicentennial in 1988, and especially after Paul Keating’s ascendancy to the prime ministership in December 1991, and his snooty declaration: “I have never been to Gallipoli and never will!” It reached a crescendo in the years leading up to the twin centenaries of the outbreak of the Great War (2014) and the Gallipoli Campaign (2015). This massive propaganda effort by the Left built on its successful “long march” through academia and key institutions, and it mobilised the intelligentsia, media and innumerable academics from across Australia, including—incredibly—personnel from the Australian Defence Force Academy and the Australian War Memorial (AWM). All of these personnel had ascended into these strategic positions in the previous decades and then made their careers by disparaging Anzac and all Australia’s military engagements going back over a century, as well as denouncing our country’s foreign policies, which are invariably seen as merely subservient to the interests, initially, of Britain, then of the United States and, more abstractly, of “Empire”, “Imperialism”, and “Colonialism”, the latter providing an opportunity to link Anzac unfavourably to the burgeoning “Black Wars” campaign.

Many of these people were simply careerists and opportunists, taking their lead from Keating, and pursuing the grant money made available by Commonwealth agencies for anti-Anzac publications and activities; or they were “useful idiots”, as Lenin called those who thought they could get on “the right side of history” by aligning themselves with “progressivist causes” championed by the Left; or they were fellow travellers or actual members of political parties committed to the “long march” and the destruction of Australia and the advancement of foreign interests, such as the now moribund Communist Party of Australia, various Trotskyist entities, the Socialist Left wing of the ALP, certain independent senators, and the Australian Greens.

Where they are capable intellectually of engaging with the Anzac tradition, these committed antagonists style themselves as historical “revisionists”, diligently applying an ideological template to attack a tradition they insist has little or no basis in reality but is merely a militaristic, imperialistic, nationalistic, patriarchal, masculinist, colonialist, white supremacist and/or racist construct designed to further the interests of capitalism, the ruling class and American imperialism.

More recently, it has become common for these characteristics (such as colonialism and racism) to be linked together using the theory and strategy of intersectionality, a concept that grew out of Marcuse’s theories and is central to identity politics. According to intersectionality, systems of oppression intersect and overlap, and this means that various identity-based groups, defined invariably in terms of victimhood, can claim to be oppressed and exploited in various ways—economically, racially, sexually—by the same system. Intersectionality therefore serves as a coalition-building tool for the Left, providing the ideological framework required to politically link together otherwise disparate groups, allow them to claim a shared experience of oppression, and portray them as collective victims of capitalism, racism, colonialism, sexism, white supremacism and so on.

Revealing present-day examples of how this strategy operates can be found on the 2024 writers’ festival circuit. In Melbourne, for example, participants will address the assertion that “Aboriginal and Palestinian solidarity has a long history, a relationship that is more vital than ever in the movement to resist colonialism and speak out against atrocities.” Similarly, the 2024 Mardi Gras was disrupted by a protest group declaring “Queer Solidarity with Palestinian Resistance”, the oxymoronic incongruity of which becomes explicable when it is realised that the common “oppressor” targeted by such protests is Western liberal democratic society.

Examples of intersectionality directly involving Anzac are provided in Ben Wellings and Shanti Sumartojo (eds.) Commemorating Race and Empire in the First World War Centenary (2018). This critiques the memorialisation of the Anzacs on the basis that the principal function of the Anzac “mythology” is to conceal the alleged mass “frontier violence” entailed by “colonialism”, and to obscure “the uncomfortable memory of the dispossession of indigenous peoples carried out in the original invasion and colonisation of the Australian continent”, thus exposing Anzac to an attack from a contrived coalition between radical indigenous groups and the pro-Palestinian/anti-Semitic groups noted above. The book also deplores the reluctance of the AWM to establish a section on the so-called “Black Wars” or to construct a highly visible monument to indigenous servicemen in the Great War (approximately 1000 according to all official estimates, or about 0.24 per cent of the total number who served). It also endorses the strategy to pursue anti-Anzac militancy at the level of local government, which is much more easily manipulated than the federal sphere.

Another example was provided by a prominent professor of history and leading feminist in a highly publicised public lecture before the 2015 centenary. While condemning the “militarisation of Australian history”, Marilyn Lake denounced the Anzac Legend because it “requires the forgetting, or disavowal, or marginalising, of other national narratives, other formative Australian experiences, other values, different stories of the past” that she claims deserve attention at least equal to that afforded the Anzacs. She then offers her own preferred version of Australian military history, once again focusing on the so-called “Black Wars”, and highlighting “the perpetual state of warfare … entailed in the colonisation of Australia [and] the nation-building project at the heart of Anzac”. Lake had earlier made clear her adoption of intersectionality in Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (1995). This attacks Anzac in terms of the oppression of women and the patriarchy’s attempt to resolve the alleged “crisis of masculinity” by re-asserting the supremacy of the male, in the guise of the Anzac warrior, as the pre-eminent subject of history in a mis-gendered “birth of the nation” narrative.

This crisis-ridden Anzac is presented elsewhere in this volume as a pathetic and inadequate figure, especially sexually. For example, in a pretentiously named chapter, “Female Desires: The Meaning of World War II”, Lake quotes the diary of a “20-year-old teachers’ college student” from 1942. This records how she “expressed [her] desire for a Yank boyfriend”, to “silly Jack P”, a hapless Anzac. It seems “Melb. & in fact all Austr. is swarming with them & I felt I’d missed life, not having met one”. Fortunately for this lady, “I can tell my Grandchildren … I too had a little experience”, a presumably life-defining seminal occasion one feels sure her grandchildren would have loved to hear about from Grandma. Lake discusses similar shortcomings of Anzac in another pointedly titled article, “The Desire for a Yank” (1992).

A further current example of intersectionality linked with Anzac is the way in which radical black activists and their white epigons, together with radical feminists, have eagerly allied themselves with the violent and unchecked (indeed, state-sanctioned) pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic protests that have been mobilised since the onset of the Israel-Gaza crisis. Out of many examples, the one that stands out is the notorious “doxing” (the provision online of personal details) of some 600 Jewish people active in the arts, leading to death threats, vile messages of hate, and harassment. This outrage was executed by a coterie of people associated with radical indigenous, feminist and anti-Anzac activity.

The shared victim-characteristic in such cases is claimed to be the indigeneity of both the Australian Aborigines and the Palestinians (conveniently ignoring the indigeneity of the Jews), while the shared oppressor is alleged to be the settler/colonialist society and its modern incarnation, liberal democracy, represented by Australia and Israel, which exploits them and threatens them with “genocide”. Intersectionality means that Anzac can be targeted by a coalition not only of conventional anti-Anzacs, but by black activists, feminists, the LGBT+ folk, pro-Palestinians, anti-Zionists, and various other self-proclaimed victim groups, all of whom claim that the Anzac Legend oppresses or exploits them in some fashion.

Where this type of anti-Anzac discourse is not impenetrable or inane, it is simply assertive and rhetorical, unsupported by persuasive evidence or coherent argument. Examples include an article by a grant-receiving perpetrator of the doxing outrage noted above. According to Matt Chun, the Anzacs and the European settlers of Australia were “marauding invaders” guilty of “unchecked barbarism”, “racialised bloodshed”, “slaughter”, “brutal massacres, poisonings, kidnappings, rapes, slavery, infanticide [and] racial apartheid”. Their story is little more than a “Boys Own Adventure”, and Anzac Day is a racist, colonialist abomination. The methodological nihilism that characterises the revisionist approach to Anzac is invoked to deny that the Anzacs died for such allegedly false ideals as “democracy, freedom, equality, or a fair go”, and in fact “their deaths were definitively senseless”.

Where it doesn’t descend to such depths, the revisionist assault on the tradition has had two main components and proceeds as follows. Some perfunctory recognition is initially given to the bravery of Australian troops who fought in the Great War and other wars, and to the military and personal qualities associated with the tradition; but then the revisionists turn to the second component of their model, upon which all significant emphasis is placed. This is invariably hyper-critical, debunking and denunciatory of the tradition and of the historical events upon which it is based. This involves applying the methodological nihilism noted above to allege that at the core of the Anzac Legend there is nothing—only meaninglessness, futility, error, “a nightmare happening in a void” as George Orwell once remarked of Great War literature. Alternatively, if there is something at the core of the legend that cannot be ignored, then it is shown by the revisionists to be unworthy, wicked and iniquitous—militarist, colonialist, racist—and therefore can and must be condemned and ridiculed.

An excellent example of the revisionist approach following this pattern is provided in The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (2008). While it concedes that the Anzacs were brave, they are nevertheless represented as pawns who were dragged into someone else’s war and betrayed by the incompetence of the “British military establishment who, contemptuous of the lives of mere colonials, sacrificed them in the futile Gallipoli campaign and as shock troops on the Western Front. The war achieved nothing, and far from proving Australian nationhood, actually demonstrated Australian subservience.”

The Handbook entry notes that this revisionism appeals particularly to those “who came of age during or after the Vietnam era”, imbibed the New Left worldview, and consequently share a “suspicion of overseas military entanglements”, associated especially with the United States. While the entry duly notes that this version “has been criticised as grotesque, even ahistorical”, this has not stopped it from being extremely influential, especially when it is augmented with the other elements of leftist ideology that have become all-pervasive in our intellectual culture since the Vietnam War era.

Revisionists have only thinly-veiled contempt for the Anzacs and those who admire their courage and sacrifice, as demonstrated by two historians who describe a group of young Australians they have accosted in Istanbul. The group reveal they’ve “just got back from Gallipoli”, and had found the experience, “bloody amazing, to think of what those blokes went through, you know … It was really moving, mate.” Despite their sincerity, these young people are dismissed by our anti-Anzac historians as deluded products of “the saccharine reverence of Anzac Day TV ‘specials’ unashamedly milking the emotions of viewers, with their montage of mournful soundtrack, waving flags and quietly weeping diggers on parade”. Not being enlightened academics, these youngsters were ignorant of how the Anzac Legend was inculcated into them by Howard government propaganda that depicts “the Anzacs as the Greeks once spoke of their Gods”.

Why is the Left so antagonistic towards the Anzac tradition? Only a summary answer can be offered here (cf. Anzac and its Enemies), but it lies in the early years of what the leading leftist historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the Age of Extremes”. This saw the coincidence of two events, one tragic—in this case, the Gallipoli campaign (1915)—and the other cataclysmic—the Russian Revolution (1917)—after which there was an inevitable clash between the respective ideologies that emerged from them. As Hobsbawm points out, before the Bolshevik victory there were a range of alternatives on the Left, but these were quickly eclipsed by the Marxist-Leninist form of communism, simply because the Bolsheviks had actually achieved state power and had set out explicitly to lead and resource a global revolution. Consequently, “in the generation after 1917, Bolshevism absorbed all other social revolutionary traditions, or pushed them onto the margin of radical movements [so that] to be a social revolutionary increasingly meant to be a follower of Lenin and the October Revolution, and increasingly [to be] a member or supporter of some Moscow aligned Communist Party”. Australia was no different from other countries, and the local Communist Party (CPA) quickly aligned itself with Moscow and the Communist International as they sought to purge all alternative visions of the path forward in the post-war world.

This included Anzac, as the Legend emerged as a powerful national ideological force at precisely the same time as the Comintern was explicitly rejecting nationalism in favour of its internationalist theory of world revolution based on violent class conflict heralded by the wave of revolutionary activity that swept through Europe between 1917 and 1923. In contrast, the Anzac ideal was based on a specifically Australian vision of a future society: nationalist, independent and harmonious, an ideal society built on values like mateship and a fair go, for which it was believed the Anzacs had fought and died.

This was all reactionary make-believe according to the CPA and its fellow travellers and supporters: “the worker has no fatherland, patriotism was the last refuge of the munitions maker [and] nationalism stood on the lunatic fringe of politics, spawned in the diseased minds of Hitler” and nurtured in Australia by the Anzac Legend. In accordance with Comintern policy, violent class struggle was required against nationalist traditions like Anzac because they bred “false consciousness” and undermined proletarian class solidarity.

The Anzac Legend was therefore denounced from the outset as backward-looking, conservative and reactionary, and this animosity became even more extreme after May 1921 when 150,000 people filled the Sydney Domain to protest at the burning of the national flag by communists at May Day demonstrations. As the Daily Telegraph summed up the events: “The citizens of Sydney in a wonderfully impressive and emphatic manner, made it clear that disloyalists, revolutionaries and enemies of the flag generally have no place in our sun.” Anti-Anzac front organisations were subsequently established by the Comintern, including the Movement Against War and Fascism, chaired by the prominent novelist and founding member of the CPA, Katharine Susannah Prichard. The MAWF and similar organisations enjoyed the support of most of Australia’s intelligentsia, literati and arts community, and this has been an allegiance upon which the Left has ever since been able to rely.

For decades leading up to and after the Second World War, Anzac and its ideals were relentlessly denigrated, nowhere more bitterly than in Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year (1960), where Hughie, an oedipally deranged university student, berates his veteran father: “Do you know what that Gallipoli campaign meant? Bugger all! An expensive shambles. The biggest fiasco of the war”, while Anzac Day, Hughie exclaims, is celebrated only by a “screaming tribe of great, stupid, drunk, and vicious, bigoted no hopers!” Naturally, the play became a staple in English curricula for decades. And then, during the 1960s and the massive expansion of the university sector, the lead was taken by the New Left which put into operation its counter-hegemonic and intersectional strategies, as we’ve seen.

Ultimately, Anzac has never been forgiven for being “on the wrong side of history” in the fanciful narrative of the modern world nurtured by the Left. And so continues the war against the Legend, and the noble spirit and values of mateship discerned by Charles Bean a century ago on the bloody shores of Gallipoli.

Mervyn Bendle’s book Anzac and its Enemies was published by Quadrant Books in 2015. His series on twentieth-century philosophers and the meaning of life will continue in Quadrant shortly.