In case you missed it, April 25 was Anzac Day. And in case you didn't get the message of the day, it was printed on the Australian flags that lined the march routes: "Their Sacrifice. Our Heritage."
Anzac Day is not about commemorating the Australian soldiers who fought and died in World War I. If it was, then the federal government wouldn't be commissioning a review of how to maintain Anzac Day once all of the diggers from World War I are dead (there are now only 24 remaining Australians who fought in the first world war).
And it certainly isn't a commemoration of all the ordinary soldiers on the other side, or all the civilians, who died in World War I or any other war that Australian soldiers were involved in. They receive little mention.
Rather, in the hands of capitalist politicians and mainstream editorial writers (always at their most sanctimonious on Anzac Day), the event has become an attempt to instill nationalism in a population which they believe needs an extra dose of it.
Rupert Murdoch's Daily Telegraph's leader is, as usual, the frothiest, railing at those who claim the day is "an affirmation of militarism and imperialism". No, the Tele declaimed, "Today, we do not celebrate war, but we do celebrate and honour the courage and self-sacrifice of all Australians who answered the call when their country's need was greatest".
Murdoch's Australian maintained its middle-class decorum but followed the essential line of his Sydney daily tabloid, saying that on Anzac Day "men and women of all political persuasions and all nationalities can join their former enemies to honour sacrifice for the national good". The Fairfax-owned Sydney Morning Herald was even meeker, but also pushed the same nationalist line.
For all the talk, however, of remembering the sacrifice of the Anzacs and how their struggle was "our" nation's "baptism of fire" and how they died so that we might live in "freedom" and "lest we forget", one thing has been forgotten: what these soldiers were sacrificed for.
That is not remembered because to do so would make it clear that they were sacrificed for values which we, and many of the soldiers themselves, do not believe in and for causes which were unjust:
* In World War I, Labor PM Billie Hughes sent Australians to help the English bankers and industrialists maintain the empire "upon which the sun never sets". Australian diggers were landed at Gallipoli in a botched attempt to conquer, subjugate and carve up Turkey.
* In World War II, Labor PM John Curtin sent Australian soldiers to help Britain maintain its colonial possessions in the Middle East, particularly Egypt, and then, when Japan advanced through the Pacific, to defend Australia's own colonial possessions, particularly Papua New Guinea.
* In 1950, Coalition PM Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Korea, to help the United States crush a worker-peasant revolution and partition the country, a war which the people of a divided Korea lost and are yet to fully recover from.
* In 1965, Menzies conscripted young Australians and started sending them to Vietnam, to help the United States crush a national-democratic revolution and to maintain the US imposed partition of the country — a war which the Vietnamese people won but are also yet to recover from.
The rank-and-file soldiers who fought in these wars should be commemorated, as should all those who suffered and died in these wars, because they did not ask for such a fate. Many of them were conscripts, after all, and many others were seduced by pro-war propaganda into thinking they were doing the right thing.
But such a commemoration should be a time not to celebrate Australian nationalism, but to revile it.
These soldiers were sacrificed on the altar of "militarism and imperialism"; they died in their rulers' attempt to impose Australia's "national interest" on others. That is what should not be forgotten.