“Do we really have to trash the AWM to get a few more hands on the levers of destruction on the way to Gaza for all? Surely, it’s better served as a memorial to our victory over war itself,” writes columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.
The character of the Australian War Memorial is about to change from a memorial to the fallen, to a sideshow for recruits. It doesn’t just normalise war as an appropriate human activity, but as a fulfilling career for the boys and girls of a new generation.
I have no problem with recruiting commercials in the media. And if the government wants to present them as something other than a kill-or-be-killed operation, good luck to them. Defence technology is heading in the other direction entirely. The days of massed armies are long gone. Indeed, we might well be inventing the final enemy ourselves: called AI.
Certainly, we’ve chosen to make the world as scary as possible through climate change. AI might come as a welcome stranger to take our place as the apex predator. But honestly, do we really have to trash the AWM to get a few more hands on the levers of destruction on the way to Gaza for all? Surely, it is better served to become a memorial to our victory over war itself.
I realise, of course, that I am one of the culprits in spreading stories that normalise, and even celebrate, our men of war. No fewer than eight of my books characterise the Australian “heroes” of war – 10 if you include the Aboriginal battle against the British invasion. Aside from the latter – which the AWM continues to ignore – they covered the period from Gallipoli to Afghanistan, beginning with the biography of Albert Jacka VC in 2006.
Already, I was concerned about the process. In an author’s note, I wrote: “The research of military literature exposed me to… an attitude towards death in war that I find deeply troubling.
“The premature, violent death of a single human being is a shocking tragedy. Often, it involves terrible agony. Always, it represents the loss of great human potential. Without exception, it causes the most devastating anguish and pain among those who loved the young man – for they are overwhelmingly young men – who is suddenly no more. One life is gone forever; other lives are scarred in ways that can never be repaired.
“Yet when we write of soldiers, we employ words like gallantry, honour and sacrifice to somehow justify the horror. And we speak, not of single deaths, but armies – millions – in a murderous obscenity. And we do so with a kind of fatalist calm that in itself is horrific. I do not excuse myself from the charge, though I have tried, wherever possible, to expose the enormity of the crime against humanity.”
I had in mind characters such as the World War I British generals Hamilton and Haig who, from the luxury of their suites far behind the lines, ordered the certain deaths of many thousands of young Australians.
Thereafter I was forever prejudiced against the British class system – and its membership – from the rulers to the ruled who permitted it… and to its bunyip shadow.
World War II produced The Battle of Brisbane with my classmate Peter Thompson where only one man died, but at the hands of an American ally; thence to the Special Forces against the Japanese invaders; and more recently the SAS before the Ben Roberts-Smith scandal.
They were not killers in their thousands; that was the fate of the civilians when we tagged along with the American military-industrial complex in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
That leads us back to the AWM under the charge of the councillors and the director, Matt Anderson, who numbers a Duntroon graduation among his many academic achievements. They fitted a Black Hawk chopper in the showplace and decided to retain the Roberts-Smith uniform and weapons. Smart moves. No doubt they’ll draw crowds of little boys.
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