ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corp.
It is based on a failed invasion at Galipoli, Turkey in WW1.
Based on a failure but was considered a campaign that showed great spirit.
Should we "celebrate" it or any of any other war effforts.
A journo I respect describes war and its effects on the young as follows.
" I hear some blowhard civic worthy blathering on about the "supreme sacrifice" or "the fallen" or "our glorious dead".
Most of them haven't a clue what they are talking about. There is nothing glorious about death in war. I saw it as a correspondent in Vietnam and know that it is brutal and infinitely disgusting. The truth is hideous.
It is to have your guts ripped out by shrapnel in No Man's Land, or to slowly drown in a torpedoed warship, or to be burnt alive in a shot-down bomber or - in our own time - to be blown to pieces by a jungle booby-trap or an improvised explosive device on some road in Afghanistan. No glory in that.
And soldiers do not die with a patriotic slogan on their lips. My late father-in-law, who fought with the Black Watch at Monte Cassino in 1944 and later with the Australian Army in Malaya, always maintained that a man's last words were most often a cry for the mother who bore him. No glory there either. Only unbearable sorrow.
There must be ways of telling our children all this, but I do not know what they are. I despair that our political leaders these days so willingly lie about their reasons for committing us to futile wars and attempt to justify the inevitable deaths with obscene banalities about "fulfilling the mission".
It is the ultimate betrayal."
Read more: http://www.smh.com.a...l#ixzz2Qz9TO9YV
Edited by voltaire, 20 April 2013 - 02:15 AM.
