Anzac Day

AFP has a good objective assessment of Gallipoli and the role it still plays in the psyche of Australia, as it is sending more troops off to brutalise another race in Iraq.

AFP has a good objective assessment of Gallipoli and the role it still plays in the psyche of Australia, as it is sending more troops off to brutalise another race in Iraq.

I agree with the article’s assessment that the action of Australians fighting under their own flag, showing some facade of independence from England, that cements the event as nationally memorable. It just simply plugs into the brutality and racism that has always marked Anglo-Saxon endeavour, that stills betrays itself in Australia’s unhealthy obsession with sport. Rather than actually fighting for our independence from Britain, like the good little colonials we still are, we’d rather brutalise some other race and earn “respect” from our colonial masters.

Classic bounding of the debate – we can exercise independence and swagger about our cultural difference from Britain or the U.S, but actually questioning that independence in matters of foreign affairs and social policy, we are servile to the corporate interests of those two empires, past and present. In recent voting in the U.N, we now also cower to the apartheid regime of the state of Israel.