What Anzac Day means to me...

Anzac Day, the quintessential day of Australian remembrance, is marked by solemn services and by marches around the country.  It falls on 25^th April, the day of the disastrous landing at Gallipoli in 1915 and it honours not only those who fell on that particular day but those who have given their lives in other theatres of war and those who have returned (many with physical and psychological wounds) to their home country.

That all these men and women should be revered in our memory goes without question but there does seem to be a legitimate argument that our admiration and respect for these heroes might be having the effect of blinding us to other aspects of the reality of war. I have some awareness of the effects of war on many of my own relatives and I cannot help but wonder how their lives would have been different had they not felt the obligation to go away to fight.

My father E.D.Murray on Anzac Day 2007

 

My own late father was one such person.  He left Australia to fight as an idealistic new graduate in the early 1940's and he performed his duties as a young officer with great gallantry, earning a Military Cross in the process.  But the horror of his war time experiences both in Africa and later in New Guinea brought great psychological suffering from which he never fully recovered though he certainly achieved much in his post-war life.  He did not, however, speak of the war to his family, and it was only when he was very old and unable to keep his demons at bay that the realities of his war experience bubbled, inexorably, to the surface.

We should feel an enormous sense of gratitude that we in Australia live in a country where democracy and the rule of law have largely averted the horrors of civil war.  I find it worrying, however, that Australia continues to send its men and women to help fight other countries' wars.  Perhaps, in this new global world, we have no choice but to take sides in the interests of our own future protection but we should never forget that the human consequences for all involved in these dreadful conflicts are almost incalculable.
 

Wars are still being fought all over the world, some with enormous loss of life and compounding human tragedy as the weapons of destruction become more complex and deadly.  Not all of these conflicts find their ways into the Western media - look at the almost complete lack of coverage in the non-African press of the Second Congo War where it is calculated 3 to 5 million people have been lost since 1998 (Hawkins qtd. in Wikipedia) - but all inflict loss of life, subjugation of the conquered and great privation for the those who manage to escape the bloodshed to simply survive in desperate, over-crowded refugee camps.  

There is nothing romantic about what is, in actual fact, systematized violence.  Perhaps we, as human beings, need to be devoting our energies to finding solutions to the problems of this conflicted and unequal world rather than eulogizing the enormous sacrifices that wars exact from those who are killed and maimed and those who are left behind.
 

Hawkins, Virgil  Stealth Conflicts: How the World's Worst Violence Is Ignored Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2008 quoted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War#cite_note-8. Web.