123 / More Anzac Day stuff: Too much glory in war
Yesterday I saw 'What's wrong with Anzac Day?' on the bookshelf. Please allow me to not read the book and still mention it (I quote from the review by Ross Fitzgerald in Spectrum, SMH, titled: Too much glory in war)
The book was written by five Australian historians "because they are deeply concerned about the flagrant promotion of Anzac Day as the Australian national day …" They write because they "want to do justice to Australia's long anti-war tradition …" and because in the past decades, we have witnessed a relentless and unfortunate militarisation of our history. Hear, hear.
They also write about those who, in 1938, saw little to celebrate Anzac Day. "Australians have mostly forgotten all those soldiers who suffered mental breakdown, died prematurely or committed suicide … overcome by the fear of death, who could not bring themselves to fight and deserted," or those who came home and found themselves unwanted and unemployed.
So why not buy the book? It wasn't written for me - it was written for those who glorify Anzac Day, who condone it and who think the militarisation of Australian history, and our present day culture, is a good thing. Think again.
Fitzgerald also quotes the historian Manning Clark, who wrote in volume five of his History of Australia: "The turn to Anzac Day as our day of glory has made our nation a prisoner of the past, rather than an architect of a new future." Anzac Day is the epitome of being stuck in the past; as well as the glorification of war. I have written about war, not just once.
I could much rather see myself read another war book, Zombie Myths of Australian Military History: The 10 Myths That Will Not Die, reviewed by Paul Ham in the Weekend Australian Review. In the book myths are destroyed, like the one that Peter Stanley slays, namely the idea that the Japanese planned to invade Australia (they didn't.) How about that? So we never were in danger of 'ending up speaking Japanese' after all!