Dennis M.
‘History wars’ are about how to control the
future.
They are not disputes over the past. Rather,
stories about the past are pressed into service to buttress the current needs
of each class and imperium.
Nowhere is this practice more blatant than
in the reinvention of ANZAC since 1990, the 75th anniversary of the
invasion of Turkey on 25 April 1915. The propaganda sought to weaken opposition
to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Legend is being promoted to oil us into whichever conflict
the US war-machine turns to next.
The ALP grabbed the opportunity of the 1990
anniversary to paper over the wounds that Indigenous Australians and their
supporters had inflicted on Hawkie’s ‘consensus’ by raining on his 1988
bi-centennial parade. From then on, all governments have thrown money at the
War Memorial and into marketing ANZAC-ery. Every other cultural institution has
suffered annual two-percent cuts, misnamed ‘efficiency dividends’.
Keating promoted Kokoda to get away from
the Brits and to put us more firmly into the US orbit. The 30-second roll-over of film clips of
Australian forces fighting from 1914 to 2014 leaves people wondering whether
the ANZACs fought at Kokoda. Surveys have shown that even the backpackers who
hoof it to Gallipoli know little more about ANZAC day than that it is when
Essendon plays Collingwood.
Despite all the money that has been poured
into celebrating slaughter, the low level of information can never be under-estimated.
In countering the propaganda, activists cannot afford to take anything for
granted. However, people are likely to be turned off if we hit them over the
head with a barrage of facts. Posing innocent questions casts doubt over larger
false assumptions. For instance, how many members of parliament know
- that the ‘I’ in AIF stands for Imperial,
not Infantry?
- that an Imperial Japanese cruiser
escorted the ANZACs to the Middle-East?
- that Russia was ‘our side’ in both world
wars?
By raising what seem like trivial pursuits,
we set people thinking about what else we need to ask. Such questioning opens
the window to the suspicion that there is a lot that we are not being told.
Central to the ANZAC invasion of the Turkish
region of Canakkale was a scheme by Churchill to supply the Czarist regime
through warm-water ports. The aim was to make sure that reverses on the Eastern
front did not provoke another revolution against Czardom. That had happened in
1905 after its defeat by Japan. Thus, the Dardanelles campaign was aimed
against the Russian people. Churchill’s fear was well grounded as 1917 proved.
To reverse the Bolshevik revolution, the Allies demonstrated their commitment
to ‘self-determination’ by sending armies of intervention into the Baltic and
Siberia from 1919 to 1924. As at the Dardanelles, the imperialists were driven
into the sea.
To win the history wars for the workers, we
need to promote positive stories from the war years.
We
won the conscription debate
The most potent line of advance is through
the two conscription plebiscites. Majorities of our people twice voted NO
against conscription for overseas service. Those choices blocked a more overt
dictatorship by the compradors. Our liberties were won at home, not on the
Western Front.
Along with the defeat of the Ban-the-Reds
bill in 1951, the anti-conscription victories are the most important achievements
for us all to absorb. Each of the three referenda is many times more significant
for Australia’s polity than was the 1688 counter-revolution in Britain that
Pyne rabbits on about for the national curriculum.
Simpson
is our hero, not theirs
Lacking the tens of millions of dollars to
combat the government’s distortions, we have to take advantage of the yarns
that the war-mongers are peddling. There are free kicks for us in regard to
Jack Simpson-Kirkpatrick and his donkey. Jack wrote to his mum in England
asking when the workers there were going to have a revolution and get rid of
the millionaire and dukes. The Department of Veterans Affairs funds a school
essay competition to perpetuate lies by omission and suppression about Simpson’s
proletarian politics. The truth is in Peter Cochrane’s just reissued book, Simpson and the donkey: the making of a legend
(Melbourne University Press, 2014).
Lest
we forget – left-wing diggers
Each region has its own left-wing diggers.
VC winner Hugo Throssell from WA came home a socialist and anti-war activist.
So did fellow West Australian Bert Facey, as he retold in A Fortunate Life. And so did the last Anzac, Tasmanian Alec
Campbell, who acted as bodyguard for railways union militant Bill Morrow in the
1930s.
What we need is not a set of counter-assertions.
Students are turned off by being shouted at. Instead, we can the enfilade the official
stance by posing questions. Hence, instead of telling students to write essays
about Simpson as an industrial militant, we can kill two lies with one
question: had Simpson survived Gallipoli, how would he have voted on
conscription in October 1916? That question becomes a reminder that the closer
the troops were to the front, the more they voted NO.
Grizzling about the lavish funding of
pro-war propaganda won’t cut through to the attitudes of the ninety-nine percent.
One practical step from the ACT Branch of the Society for the Study of Labour
History is an essay competition to bring attention to the war on the home
front. Other groups and activists should approach their local schools to see
what is possible. (Teachers will find lots of useful material on the honesthistory
website.)
Honouring
the black resistance: frontier wars
Since 2012, a band of Aborigines from the
Tent Embassy has led settler supporters behind the official 11am march up Canberra’s
ANZAC Parade. The marchers carry placards documenting the ‘Frontier Wars’. The
crowd applauds the contingent.
The War Memorial is now anxious to bring the Indigenous inside the official marquee. So, it stage-manages a ceremony to honour the Indigenous who served – after decades of neglect. RSL clubs had long refused to admit them. One matter on which consensus is unlikely to be reached before the war celebrations wind-down in 2020 is how to deal with the ‘Frontier Wars’.
We must support the erection of a memorial
to the warriors. But that installation can have no place among memorials
celebrating the invaders’ side of the frontier. How many Indigenes want to be
tied to the settler troops sent against their Maori brothers and sisters in the
New Zealand Wars of 1860-64?
War and peace are class questions. Every
war memorial is a monument to how working people from every country were used
to advance the needs of monopolising capitals. We have to reclaim those statues
and lists of names for our class as sites of conflict.
Respect
and understand the views of workers
We also need to appreciate why some workers
could embrace ANZAC Day as ‘the one day of the year’. Alan Seymour’s 1962 play of
that name ends with the father cornered into admitting that ANZAC Day is the
only time when anything he has done is given any public acknowledgment. His work
receives no recognition. This explanation for his chest-beating is an
indictment against the destructiveness of capitalism, second to the slaughter
itself.
We can extend his insight. ANZAC-ery is
reducing the notion of serving the people to war service. The hour-by-hour service
to the well-being of communities from nurses and teachers is marginalised. The
choice of yet another general as governor-general reinforces the lie that men
with guns embody what it means to be Australian – never forgetting the mining
magnates and stock-exchange jobbers whose interests those guns protect.
