A nation is not built with the bones of the fallen
Words & images © Paul Ransom
NB: A previous version of this piece was published in 2015 in the lead up to the ANZAC Centenary here in Australia. Now, eleven years later, the core sentiment remains relevant. Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, USA/Iran, etc.
Today we call it radicalisation. However, the notion that young men can be enticed to walk away from their ordinary lives to fight in supposedly moral wars against allegedly evil foes is much older than the latest jihad.
The unbridled enthusiasm that Australian boys from 1914 showed for leaving their loved ones and sailing to the Middle East to take part in a heroic crusade for someone else’s empire is not so dissimilar to the phenomenon of fired-up young warriors from the internet age jetting off to fight for a Caliphate. Don’t let the whitewashed ANZAC legend – and others of its kind – obscure this.
The point here is not simply ‘my hero/your terrorist’, or even a question of just/unjust, but something fundamental about the psychology of warfare. As others have noted, conflicts given the lure of moral clarity are an extremely attractive proposition to young men. In these wars they are afforded the chance to be part of something bigger than themselves; and to do so with their ‘brothers’. Abstract rewards like democracy being preserved or a supply of willing virgins in the hereafter are simply the sugar coating.
We would be naïve to think that the British Empire’s WW1 pitch to the patriotic duty of its far flung dominions was presented in anything other than emotive, do or die terms; all of which were intended to make a premature death seem valorous. Glorious. Likewise, we would be doing a disservice to the bones of ‘our boys’ if we co-opted their sacrifice to keep alive the myths for which they were slaughtered.
When I hear the oft cited misnomer that the Gallipoli bloodbath was this country’s formative national event, that Australia was born during a beachfront massacre on the morning of April 25, 1915, I fear for the ghosts of the Dardanelles. After all, it is not as though the eight month campaign was a particularly Australian experience.
True Blue Aussies everywhere will doubtless be crying, sacrilege! However, before anyone downs their commemorative ANZAC biscuit in disgust, here’s a numerical perspective.
| Combatants | Dead | Wounded |
| Ottoman Empire | 56,643 | 107,007 |
| UK | 34,072 | 78,520 |
| France | 9,798 | 17,371 |
| Australia | 8,709 | 19,441 |
| NZ | 2,721 | 4,752 |
| India | 1,358 | 3,421 |
| Newfoundland | 49 | 93 |
The point is simple but profound. The 113,350 men who died defending three now equally extinct empires, (British, French, Ottoman), did not build a single nation between them. Although Mustafa Kemal Ataturk may have laid the ground for his personal rise to power by winning the battle – and later ensured his victory was enshrined as a defining national moment in modern Turkey – he, like others, was merely commandeering bodies for his cause. As Presidents and other warlords still do.
From the distance of a century we can now see that the protagonists of WW1 did not put their colonial capital on the line so that you and I could be free; and if they were defending a way of life it certainly was not the one being endured by the factory hands and farm workers who marched off to become machine gun fodder.
I believe this renders the breathless, ‘sad read’ pontification of the annual ANZAC Day ritual disingenuous at best, wilfully disrespectful at worst. That those young men should again be the foot soldiers for those who would seek to sell grand and illusory narratives is to tear them once more away from their families, make hollowed out heroes from their bones, and perpetuate the dangerous martial fantasy that dying with a flag on your back is a great thing.
All wars have unintended consequences. Whatever cynicism or bravery we may attribute to the men behind WW1, it is fair to suggest that they did not think it would destroy their empires, seed revolutions, and explode their national debts. Nor, as French economist Thomas Piketty points out in his book Capital In The Twenty-First Century, did they foresee that the fiscal fallout of the war would result in the massive expansion of the tax base, (and the subsequent creation of the ‘social state’). After the slaughter, developed nations expanded governmental responsibility far beyond pre-1914 regalian limits, (military & police, courts & property rights, and the occasional road), to encompass health, education, and welfare.
Imagine the outrage of flag waving patriots at dawn parades and misty eyed backpackers at Anzac Cove if anyone were to suggest that the 8709 Australian dead at Gallipoli made their ultimate sacrifice to create progressive taxation or, worse, to pave the way for arts funding. Ideological theft, they’d howl – and they’d have a point.
This is why we should allow these men to rest in peace. They have already taken a bullet for someone else’s empire. Let us not make them the zombies of another myth.
When I think of young boys crouching terrified in dysentery infested trenches wondering whether the bell was about to toll for them, I do not think nation building. Neither do I think that God signed off on their untimely deaths. Rather, I think of boys who did not know what they were getting into. As opposed to the old men – miles away, deaf to the screaming – who knew exactly what they were doing; but went ahead and did it anyway.
As If You Were Listening 