ANZAC 'legend'

Every time somebody opens their mouth to speak of the ANZACs, I never seem to hear anything negative. It's always, "They fought so heroically... showed great mateship... smiled in dire circumstances... etc.". From my perspective (some distance up my own ass), excluding the mateship, these are the things we should be dismissing. Everybody knows that 'heoric' and 'courageous' are just euphemisms for 'blind sheep'. They knew they were jumping over the barricades to certain death but they did it anyway. Why? To defend some notion of a 'motherland' that most of them had probably never even seen. This is absurd. The fact that they were smiling suggests that they too found something amusing about the whole conflict. Perhaps they realised all to late that they were screwed and found this to be thoroughly humorous. Perhaps they were laughing at their British counterparts and their ridiculous accents. Perhaps they had just gone totally delirious. Or perhaps they enjoyed all the killing.

Having said all that, I don't have anything at all against the ANZACs. Quite the opposite, ANZAC Day is one of the few public holidays that I believe in. What I have qualms against is the way that people over glorify the ANZACs and the war they were in. The fact that we have a march where we parade them in front of thousands of people is distasteful at best. Let them rest in peace.