ANZAC Day

Here it is again, dawn services to commemorate the sacrifices of our brave soldiers and fighting forces in wars and military actions of all shapes and sizes but basically the landing at Channackle in the Dardanelles as part of an English offensive to piss Russia off, and put pressure on the Turkish.
Was it the right kind of pressure to put on a degenerate state?

I learnt something about our history this year that shocked me.

It's been a long time since I was shocked by atrocity, usually i feel resigned and numb to what has happened and seems like will always happen. Humans are such shit-bags so much of the time. Somehow, this cut through to me so that yesterday and today have been made fresh again. Perhaps this is old news for you, so patience please for those among us to whom this is new. Ordinarily I wouldn't try and parse something this big, I would refer you to a text or to a web page.
So here's Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_massacre
and another Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANZAC_Day
and my story for today falls in the gap between the two.

The massacre and then our landing. Do we hold any responsibility for the actions of the Ottomans against the Armenians? Perhaps not - certainly not directly - but should this atrocity have it's place in our commemoration of this time? Absolutely!

After all, isn't that the point of ANZAC Day? That it's important to remember these things, and wars are bad but it's good people who fight them, and so on. But that doesn't seem to be what we do so much anymore. We seem to be glorifying, mythologising and embroidering a story about war, getting further and further from the messy truth of the matter rather than feeling the immediacy of loss and interrogating our present actions as a nation in light of the pain of the past.

Which is to say that the landing in that small shingle cove was wrapped up in a flow of other events that we deliberately stay blind to.

If we insist that we "came of age as a nation" in that landing, then we must remember the full nature of that phrase. A loss of innocence is important because it is about accepting the full range of costs an adult can understand. We were not just as a fighting force mis-used at the hands of our British masters, but as must accept our complicity in a bungled foreign policy where a whole race of people suffered the consequences. That is what has been lost along the way.

That our heartfelt pilgrimages to the cove (Yes, I went there, as so many people my age have done, and like them, I didn't hear of the Armenian massacre from my charming Turkish hosts) and the hair-raising on our arms and necks during these most solemn services are sincere is not in question, but the point of these services must also to refresh the sense of responsibility that we as citizens have for the actions of our warriors and their leaders.

Australian and New Zealand troops landed on a small cove, north of the main English action. They weren't quite in the right spot, but no real matter - warfare is like that. The ground rose steeply and their objective was to take the high ground. Soldiers since Sun Tzu would recognise the objective. A dawn landing would give them the advantage of surprise - it's all by the book. Our enemy was known to be ruthless, vicious and ready to defend their land, and they did so successfully.

Knowing they could not fight on two fronts, they slaughtered the civilians who were rebelling against mistreatment, and focused their energies on repelling the foreign invaders. We turned the Turks into a part of our fairytale about manhood and nationhood and for all our rhetoric about *remembrance* we seem deeply unwilling to remember the cost the invasion had for the Armenian people. They should be our partners in this story. They should have a place in our services and our myth.

It turns out that even now, the victors still get to write the history.
Today, as I made the traditional biscuits that will go up to Ma & Pa picking in the patch, and I know that Grandad would be coming home from the service, and even now, as I finish writing, my work colleagues are laying wreaths and listening to speeches, I could not think of anything but how horrible, how utterly saddening that slaughter was in thought and in deed. How interwoven it is with our small, blind role in a ill-managed battle, how it is but a thread in what was to become the Second World War, where Hitler remembered what the Turks had gotten away with when he had his own *troublesome* internal populations to deal with.

I honour our warriors and commemorate their personal sacrifices. As a thinking citizen, I also interrogate our role in wars, in battles, in invading other countries. If we do not remember the ugly consequences of some of these actions, we risk diminishing those sacrifices. Sun Tzu also pointed out that the best way to win was to plan to not fight - that negotiation, maneuvering, information, terrain, politics, so many things could be used by a good leader before force should be deployed.
Today I am sorrowful for the deaths of the soldiers on that harsh ground and am shaken that we choose not to remember the full actions of our enemies at that time in preference for glorifying our ability to take a beating. Not much of a myth to live up to when you look at it that way.