On other Anzac Day posts

Anzac Day gets so much written about it now, I find it hard to come up with anything original to contribute. But each year I can always count on some dubious post or comment from Larvatus Prodeo on the topic.

This year, Mark Bahnisch proposes that it was Paul Keating who played an important role in "reviving" Anzac Day to the current high regard that it seems to enjoy in the community today.

I am far from convinced. I don't recall Anzac Day ever being really "on its last legs" in the 1980's, as Mark suggests. (He doesn't sound like the type of teenager/young man to be attending marches at the time to see first hand, but I could be wrong.) However, it does seem clear that in the last decade or so it has become embraced in a way that was not predicted.

I don't really have an alternative explanation to push here, but I suspect that the increasing loss of grandparents who were WWII veterans may have had something to do with it.

For a Keating skeptic like me, his forays into history were a matter of trying too hard to impose his views and his sense of the "right" type of patriotism on the population, and as such came across as posturing and a tad insincere. I feel certain I would not be on my own in that reaction.

At least in Australia, the power of politicians to influence community attitudes on such matters is easily overestimated, I reckon.

The most puzzling thing Mark says is in his comment 9 to his post:

I think his [Keating's] purpose, as I’ve said, was to lay to rest the stoushes over conscription and the massive sectarian divide that Billy Hughes opened up. Implicit in this, and sometimes explicit, was a view that WW1 probably had been futile - an Imperialist adventure. He tried to weave it into a new story, but the hereditary defenders of the British Empire vented their fury accordingly.

In the thread, Geoff Honnor at comment 19 challenges this; it would appear neither he nor I can recall any "venting" against Keating on the issue of the worthiness of WWI. As Honnor says, the disenchantment with that war overall seems to have been pretty much immediate.

Similarly, John Quiggin repeats an older post of his in which he makes the comment that Gallipoli campaign was bloody and pointless, as indeed was the whole of WWI, a war of which "nothing good came ...." The surprising bit is that he then says that the danger now seems that we will forget this.

Really? What is evidence that there is any risk at all that young people will start to think that either Gallipoli or WWI were really worthwhile exercises that had good results? They certainly wouldn't be getting that idea from their school teachers, that's for sure.

If the past is another country, it sometimes seems that the left is too.