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I once asked a social worker friend why family disputes can so often lead to terrible fighting, sometimes spilling out onto the streets. His cynical, but amusing response was “Oh that is simple, it’s because conflict and fighting is exciting and fun, cheap, and the whole family can join in.” The first point, that destructive behaviour is entertaining and fun is, of course, a reflection of the malevolent side of human nature.
The destruction of a culture can also be fun, and there are plenty of examples of people enjoying this fun all around us. Once there were institutions that promoted and celebrated Western civilisation and culture, but now many of those same institutions do their upmost to denigrate it. These institutions include universities, museums, some churches, the professions, media, corporates, as well as governments and their bureaucracies.
An example of the destruction of culture is the way statues of national heroes are frequently damaged, destroyed or stolen. Statues of Captain Cook are often a target, perhaps because he is mistakenly thought to have settled Australia, or simply because using a grinder to destroy a monument is a lot of fun.
National pride, as expressed by Australia Day, is on life support. Even regional town anniversaries are in doubt, as demonstrated by the problems Albany, in Western Australia, is having with its planned Bicentennial celebrations in 2026. The Australian (13 March 2024) reported that “Plans to celebrate the bicentenary of Western Australia’s first colony began to implode when the maritime historian commissioned to write about the arrival of the Brig Amity in 1826 said he intended to emphasise the use of colonial-era ships to enslave and dispossess First Peoples around the world”. If a regional town in WA cannot celebrate its history, what chance does a state, or a nation, have of celebrating their histories?
One national icon in Australia stands alone in remaining revered, ANZAC Day. Could this institution ever be threatened with being cancelled, or to use that cringeworthy expression, “be re-imagined”?
ANZAC day has had its problems in recent history. During the 1970s, attendance at ANZAC Day ceremonies was weak. Radical feminist groups desecrated war memorials with the spray-painted slogan, “War is Rape”. The Vietnam era vibe was hostile to the military, and to ANZAC day.
But how would you go about destroying ANZAC Day, or is it even possible to lay a glove on it? As a thought experiment (and certainly not a guide on how to destroy ANZAC Day) I considered how it could be done.
The story of the ANZAC soldiers could be retold through contemporary ideology. Applying modern morals on previous generations is an easy way to demonise the past. The ANZAC soldiers wrote copious letters home, and to test a theory I visited the Department of Veterans Affairs website and sought out the ANZAC portal. In the ANZAC portal I searched using the highly offensive “N word”, in common use at the time. Up came a letter from an officer who was recording his observations of Ceylon, while on the way to the battlefields of Europe (trigger warning) …..
The streets not formed, unclean, irregular, houses or hovels in all stages of decay. Nigger odour being the prevailing feature combined with gesticulating native.
Darkies of both sexes – children of all ages, sleeping anywhere and everywhere, not being particular how hard.
With regard to clothing they hardly conform to the demands of civilisation.
The above words would outrage today’s social justice warriors. It would be easy to paint the soldiers of that age as racist bigots and the war as pure colonialist folly. Nothing worth celebrating. Let’s move on.
The efforts of soldiers in World War II are harder to denigrate, after all, they were fighting real Nazis, not the make-believe ones often so labelled these days. And the Japanese, of course, brutalised Australian prisoners of war, and were a major military threat to the nation, so discrediting the soldiers fighting the Japanese is a stretch. Maybe the attention could be not on the enemy, but the nature of war itself, reminiscent of what the feminists did in the 1970s. The focus could be on toxic masculinity, and how this leads to war, and how the army oppressed minority soldiers, such as Aborigines and LGBT+ people. Through a therapeutic sleight of hand, WW2 becomes a discussion not about sacrifice and courage, but about Australia’s misguided past and how the result of these attitudes causes war. Or the focus could move more towards the so-called ‘Frontier wars’. Perhaps the Australian War Memorial could help expand on these issues. (editor’s note: The AWM is already there.) The Korean and Vietnam wars and later conflicts could be breezily dismissed asthe follies and bad ideas of old white men.
The counter-arguments to the deletion of ANZAC Day are that many Australian families have direct links to war service and a lot of those are strong defenders of ANZAC Day.
Also, there are long standing institutions such as the RSL, the Australian War Memorial, the Shrine of Remembrance, states’ memorials, and in recent times, the truly excellent National ANZAC Centre in Albany, all formidable defenders of the tradition. However, as noted above, ANZAC Day has been unpopular in the past, and those of our institutions that once celebrated Western civilisation have surrendered to woke without firing a shot. As Ronald Reagan put it, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for.” History confirms how much can be forgotten by a culture in one generation; as has been said, “civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”
Ultimately, I think ANZAC Day will survive, but it will be contested, with a strong attempt to re-focus it in directions other than commemorating courage, sacrifice and mateship. A lesson to be drawn from Australia Day is that even if the majority of the public still supports an institution or an event, once the elites signal that an issue is “problematic”, political leaders quickly get the wobbles about supporting it. Preventing this requires courage from political leaders to reflect the will of the broader public rather than the elites.
Perhaps the strongest protection for ANZAC Day now would be to emphasise that the Gallipoli campaign was a victory by the Muslim Turks over the Christian armies of Britain, Australia and France.
But DougD we can be more specific than saying ‘Muslim Turks’ as history records that the opposing side was the Ottoman Caliphate with a vast empire in the Middle East that included Palestine.
When I was a student in the 1970s ANZAC was pretty uncool; the Commentariat scorned it, and it appeared to be headed slowly for oblivion. Then a younger generation took it up with enthusiasm and it became once more an occasion of community celebration. I still don’t know how this happened when there were such powerful forces aligned agin it, but perhaps it reflects a need we have to self respect?
I agree with your sentiments here, Brad. As alluded to, above, by DougD and brandee, Gallipoli was about fighting Muslims, so another big negative score for ANZAC. Furthermore, it was no doubt racist — after all, our mob was fighting Asians. Perhaps it all turns on whether Turks view themselves as privileged whites, or “people of colour” (I have a sneaking suspicion that Turks have more important things to think about). As for WWII, of course Japan was an innocent victim, forced reluctantly into aggressive and abominable behaviour by a racist West. As we should all know by now, the world would be a perfect place without all the evils created by the West.
Our family have an anual pligrimage to go to a different town’s Anzac Day in our region of the Far North Coast. There a re a variety of small and large towns, each with their own cherished and well maintained Anzac memorial. We’ve noticed that the turnout is increasing, with younger generations there in unison with the older ones. I sometimes speculate that rural areas like ours, if the celebration of Anzac Day is an indication, are becoming repositories of common sense and isolated bastions of real life.
You’re optimistic. Like everything else, ANZAC day is a fad in this time of moral vacuity. It too shall pass. If you don’t believe that then look at how we’re treating an actual, living VC recipient.
April 8, 2024
Point taken about Ben Roberts-Smith. But an institution of over a century’s standing can scarcely be classified as a fad.