Cheerleading for War – 100 years of learning nothing

5
0

8763742_3515591-stscrd01_l

Today is NZs chance to get up and shake it’s hips and cheerlead for the First World War. As a country we are simply too juvenile and immature to genuinely question ourselves, even a century after throwing our brightest and best mindlessly into the grinder of war, why we engaged in this empty war in the first place.  We still haven’t really learned any lesson from pointlessly engaging in armed conflict.

The incompetence of our British masters, the non existent post trauma services, the new generation of Men locked into a silent hell trying to deal with that trauma, the terrible loss of life and injury, etc etc. The list of damage caused by war is never acknowledged in these celebrations, we still send troops into war to commit war crimes because our mates want us to just as Key did with sending the SAS back into Afghanistan.

For me the heroes are those  conscientious objectors who refused point blank to engage in state sanctioned violence, and the families who were left behind to cope as their Fathers, Brothers, Uncles, boyfriends and lovers were shipped to the other side of the world to die on foreign beaches with human beings we had not quarrel with.

I will bow my head today for them, and their courage.

I have no time for the false pretsne of nationhood forged on battlefields bullshit, that is a lie we tell ourselves to give meaning to the row after row after row of graves. My promise to the next generation of NZers is that as an adult in my country, I will never throw their lives away as needlessly as my predecessors did one century ago.

 

The Gunner’s Lament

A Maori gunner lay dying
In a paddyfield north of Saigon,
And he said to his pakeha cobber,
“I reckon I’ve had it, man!

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

‘And if I could fly like a bird
To my old granny’s whare
A truck and a winch would never drag
Me back to the Army.

‘A coat and a cap and a well-paid job
Looked better than shovelling metal,
And they told me that Te Rauparaha
Would have fought in the Vietnam battle.

‘On my last leave the town swung round
Like a bucket full of eels.
The girls liked the uniform
And I liked the girls.

‘Like a bullock to the abattoirs
In the name of liberty
They flew me with a hangover
Across the Tasman Sea,

‘And what I found in Vietnam
Was mud and blood and fire,
With the Yanks and the Reds taking turns
At murdering the poor.

‘And I saw the reason for it
In a Viet Cong’s blazing eyes
We fought for the crops of kumara
And they are fighting for the rice.

‘So go tell my sweetheart
To get another boy
Who’ll cuddle her and marry her
And laugh when the bugles blow,

‘And tell my youngest brother
He can have my shotgun
To fire at the ducks on the big lagoon,
But not to aim it at a man,

‘And tell my granny to wear black
And carry a willow leaf,
Because the kid she kept from the cold
Has eaten a dead man’s loaf.

‘And go and tell Keith Holyoake
Sitting in Wellington,
However long he scrubs his hands
He’ll never get them clean.’

 

James K Baxter, 1965

5 COMMENTS

  1. World War One happened because the European rich and idle were bored and wanted some action. It is put into simple terms in the Blackadder television series. Baldrick asks Blackadder how the war started and Blackadder replies that basically the war began because it was too much trouble not to have a war. Simplistic but true. Our country joined it out of some blind sense of obedience to the Empire. For our trouble we suffered the worst casualties amongst troops per head of population and our lads were used as cannon fodder in Turkey. To make matters worse nothing was really settled afterwards, lessons were not learned with the result that the war resumed 30 years later led by Hitler. World War One aptly demonstrates the stupidity and pointless aggression of mankind against itself, and that is how it should be remembered. Individual people in the conflict were heroic, no question, but it was not a heroic war, it was a dumb pointless war.

  2. NZ settlements no matter how small are dotted with memorial arches, plaques, flag poles and halls recording war dead because 1 in 10 were directly involved in WWI, nearly every family was affected. Māori names abound, nearly wiped out by the British colonists but soon deemed fit to defend “hamburger hill” on their behalf over at the other side of the world.

    It is difficult to celebrate anything apart from the conscientious objectors, while pitying “the armless, the legless, the blind and insane” that returned to early deaths or blighted lives.

    Grotesquely the Gaza massacre happening in the middle of the WWI centenary is a useful example of what actually happens in shooting wars for any young people sucked into the birth of the Nation meme.

  3. The point is to remember that these young men of our country went and threw themselves into the mouths of hell. Regardless of their reasons for the sacrifice of life, limb or innocence, we owe it to ourselves that collectively we recognise a generation of new zealanders who had carried our values to the world built a national identity over a provincial one and on their return built a country that has enjoyed the fruits of liberty and protection of the vulnerable because they themselves had visited the alternatives.

  4. Agreed. My grandfather was one of them. Gallipoli and the Western Front. wounded and sent home eventually, but so badly traumatised by undiagnosed “shell shock” as they used to call it (PTSD), that he became a hopeless alcoholic, which split the family, and my family still living with the legacy of that, almost 100 years later. (My father died of depression, years later, as a direct result of that).

    And, all for what? Nothing of any real value, actually. My father and uncles had to go and do it all over again, a couple of decades or so later. The powers-that-be totally messed up in that war, and then they totally messed up in the peace that followed, creating the conditions that led to the rise of fascism and Hitler, etc.

    I NEVER attend Anzac Day services, and never will, because I refuse to take part in the hypocracy and bulls**t, led by our current “leaders”, people like JK who know NOTHING about the truth of the horrors of war, and just stand up their mouthing ignorant platitudes about “sacrifice”, etc.

    • Full marks for commenting Peter it takes courage to go against the flow.

      My Uncle was killed, blown to bits actually, in 1944 at Monte Casino and is on the records at Auckland War Memorial Museum etc. and my father was a Canada trained navigator. I was most fortunate in that while raised on all the WWII history books and war stories, my parents took the bit about fighting for democracy seriously.

      They said Uncle Bob died for people to be free (whether he actually felt that way I do not know), so while they supported Muldoon they also supported my right to oppose Muldoon and idiots at the RSA who always seemed so reactionary in the 70s.

Comments are closed.