War and Remembrance

Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we try not to get too caught up in any country’s nationalism, especially when it comes to commemorating wars. This is because wars are never remembered the way they should be, that is, as uncontrollable engines of death that governments initiate without thinking through the consequences. Too often, the people in charge use the occasion of remembrance of a past war as a way of stumping for some new war they’ve got planned. At the Blasphemy Blog, we stand when the national anthem is played or the flag is presented, but we do not sing along or recite a pledge. We are thinking about other things, and we don’t think about wars the way governments do.

But there is an exception to this rule, and that exception is today. April 25 is ANZAC day, the day when the people of Australia and New Zealand commemorate the death of about 10,000 soldiers of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (the “ANZACs”) at Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula, in 1915. Astonishingly, these two countries, neither of which is particularly known for pacifism, remember Gallipoli as all wars ought to be remembered. That is, they remember it as a senseless waste of human life.

This is not to say that a little jingoism doesn’t sometimes make its way into the day’s ceremonies; John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, invokes the ANZACs occasionally when he addresses the fact that Australians now fight with the coalition in Iraq. He does this, but the story of Gallipoli overwhelms any attempt his words make to co-opt it. This is because the facts of the campaign in which the ANZACs fought warrant no interpretation except that war stinks.

Australia and New Zealand were technically independent nations by the time World War I came around, but not to the extent that they had their own foreign policies. So the ANZACs got sent to fight British enemies in Turkey. Opinions differ as to whether the British generals and admirals in charge were incompetent or just faced with an impossible task. Whatever the case, when the ANZACs went charging up the beach at Gallipoli, they were cut to pieces by Turkish shells. The one “success” of the campaign occurred later, on August 8, when a battalion of soldiers from Wellington, New Zealand, took and held a hill called Chunuk Bair, above the beach. By the end of fighting that day, 690 of the 760 Wellington ANZACs were dead. They were relieved by the British, who held the position for one more day. The British withdrew from Turkey permanently before the end of the year.

It’s hard to put a positive spin on this kind of military experience. This is probably why the prevailing cultural feeling in Australia and New Zealand is one of somber remembrance. It’s not that they don’t want to feel upbeat about it; it’s that they can’t. The facts don’t allow it. It also helps that the ANZACs were basically conscripted into the British Army, which means that people down under can disparage the battles without any injury to national pride. But, even though it has happened by accident, ANZAC day remains the one military holiday on which people see war clearly for what it is.

The search for meaning in human history is a worthwhile endeavor, but we must always be mindful, when it comes to wars, that wars often “mean” not much at all. When a war is over, it has always been fought for different reasons than those reasons for which it was begun. Politicians smile before and after the war and when they tell us both reasons, but wars are only about cause and effect, not reasons. War, as a horseman of the Apocalypse, doesn’t care if we have a good reason. He just wants us to get on with it. You’d think that getting written up in the Book of Revelations as a harbinger of doom would make war unpopular, but apparently War the Horseman has a good press agent, and lots of politicians and captains of industry in his pocket. It’s not easy to resist War. But sometimes, like today, people remember that War is not our friend.