Sign up to receive the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning No less, it also makes it easier to shirk responsibility for combat survivors and their families, those who are bequeathed the drug addiction, the terrible domestic violence and suicide that played out in plague proportions behind tens of thousands of bolted-shut suburban front doors in the decades after the first world war. He was ignored.īut the point he was making is clear: do not sugar-coat the realities of remembering war with beatific language.Īny notion that most soldiers willingly sacrifice themselves en masse (as opposed to knowingly putting themselves in harm’s way to do an important job), also tends to abrogate political and command responsibility for their deaths. He urged government to “try to avoid the utterly demeaning term ‘fallen’ when speaking of war dead – they did not trip over a stick or garden hose, they were drowned, burned, shot, gassed and eviscerated to lie face down in mud or sand or at the bottom of the ocean”. So this Remembrance Day, I’ll be remembering something Australia’s commemoration sector won’t remind you of: politicians will always jump at starting wars in which young combatants and civilians of all ages will die horribly in their millions.īefore Australia’s $600m, four-year festival of first world war commemoration (Australia spent more than any other country on remembering each of its 60,000 dead first world war soldiers), a Vietnam veteran, Jim Robertson, wrote a submission to the federal government about the tone of the remembrance. Remembrance is as much about what our cultural and political leaders willingly forget as that which they recall.
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