ANZAC Day 2025 – lest we remember

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
23
689

Every ANZAC Day it’s not a case of ‘lest we forget’, it’s a case of  ‘lest we remember’.

As the dead groan under their weight at the horror with which we cheerfully threw them into the mincer of war, they scream at us to never make the same mistakes.

We always make the same mistakes.

This right wing Government have sucked us into the vortex of a new war in the Red Sea as Winston sells our independent foreign policy to the American Military Industrial Complex for 3 Magic Beans!

The NZDF kindly informed us  that their mission in Yemen will be kinetic and might kill civilians.

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Why are NZ taxpayers paying to bomb the poorest country in the middle east in a tactic that almost every single intelligence network tells us will only empower the Houthie?

Haven’t we grown up as a country and will no longer feed the dogs of war with the lives of our brightest and youngest? When we do go to war it should only ever be for the right reasons and never simply to please an overseas power, aren’t these the lessons we are supposed to have learned when we walk around our War Museums staring at the cringe worthy posters calling on men to fight for ‘King and Country’ as we pass name after name after name after name of the ‘glorious’ dead’?

Isn’t that what we should be solemnly promising the dead at dawn? That they have not died in vain and that we have learned to avoid conflict without flag blinded nationalism that pointlessly slaughters so many?

We have learnt nothing.

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!

‘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

Note the date

 

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23 COMMENTS

    • You only point to one side as being war criminals.
      No one is above blame and it is the one eyed view of the world that causes conflict in the first place .
      As Jesus said let him with no sin cast the first stone.

      • Hmm, and yet you slavishly follow those of whom the Christian bible says Jesus said “I will make them come and bow down before your feet, and they will learn that I have loved you.”

        Seems the wrong way round, hmm?

  3. The whole thing is disgusting frankly, I never acknowledge it in any way, and hate seeing kids go up with the medals of their great grandfathers and all that shit.

    Stop wars should be the cry for all bloody wars.

    It horrifies me just how many of Aotearoa young ones have been sent to slaughter.

    None of my mother’s 6 brothers went to war, they were all pacifists, some went into hiding and some into internment.

    Everyone should have to read Baxter’s book We will not cease.

    Imagine if they tried conscription now!!

    Of course it is those on high

  4. Highly recommend you listen to the ballad of Bill Hubbard on YouTube it’s one of the most harrowing things I have ever listened to. Based on a BBC interview in the 1980s it recounts the story of Alf Rizzel who’s job was to recover the identity papers of the dead in no man’s land in the Somme who came across Bill Hubbard mortally wounded who he had to leave to die. Seriously fucked up.

  5. We need our soldiers to fight for our freedom and combat tyranny on our streets today, so that we will not be bludgeoned to death waiting for a bus. If we aren’t safe in peacetime who cares what they fought for.

    • You do know that soldiers can’t change people’s hearts? While the murder at the bus stop is evil no amount of human authority can change the way that people think. Having quality education, housing, healthcare and employment would certainly help reduce conflict within society however with the best government that money can buy all those services are being downgraded so I expect violence to get worse.
      Since the article is about Anzac day you would hope that people would learn the lesson not to glorify war however many people condemn other nationalities and faith groups because of some difference and support wars so they shouldn’t be surprised when unstable people commit violence locally because they don’t differentiate between international and local issues.

    • What a leap of logic Ethan. Soldiers fighting for freedom and police, supposedly, making the streets safe for citizens are not quite the same.

  9. Every year or so I visit a small town in North Eastern France to attend services to honour aircrew killed on the 28 July 1944. My father’s crew were among them. Believe me, the French have not forgotten them. There were over a hundred people at the service for Dads crew. These guys should have been down at the pub chatting up girls rather that being packed into a Noisy, freezing tube on their way to create more nightmares for themselves over what they were doing to people on the ground. Dad carried survivors guilt for decades, detested the warmongering RSA tub thumpers and was implacably opposed to any New Zealand involvement in future foreign conflicts. Seeing the broken, angry, introverted and shattered men who returned reinforced Dads views for me.
    To me ANZAC day isn’t about honouring the glorious dead ( I bet all of them would have refused the glory if they could have had another 50 yrs) but about not forgetting the dreadful outcomes of war.
    Lest We Forget.

    • My birth father died with his crew in August 1944 when his plane went down over central France. Previously he had been hit and tried to make it back to Britain with one engine but came down in the Channel. All of the crew were saved, in their rubber dinghy. And then all went up again, and we appreciate their sacrifice. I am troubled that it seems to be wasted looking at the trends of countries and their drive for what is called progress, which really means how to make money, get stuff faster. Only one man escaped – the rear gunner – and he sat down and penned a letter to each of his dead comrades’ families. I have kept all my father’s things that were passed to me, and read much about war, it seems an inevitable happening at far too regular intervals.

  10. “We shall remember them” unless we are trying to ignore a genocide in progress.

    Letters to the Editor

    Anzac graves in Gaza.

    The Herald on Sunday’s headline ‘Kiwis cover Gallipoli remains with respect’ describes how the Commonwealth War Graves Commission team including members of the NZDF and NZ Embassy assisted in covering up the (recently exposed) remains’. A karakia was recited, the last Post played.

    The situation is different for the Gaza War Cemetery, in Gaza City, also administered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It was carefully tended before the recent Gaza War by the government in Gaza, in co-ordination with the commission. It contains graves for 3,691 dead, including 253 Australians and 23 New Zealanders. Along with most Palestinian graveyards across Gaza, which have been destroyed, this cemetery has also suffered damage due to Israeli Defence Force attacks.

    Has the New Zealand Government investigated the condition of the Gaza War Cemetery? Has it complained of this disrespectful situation to the Israeli government, or to the Israeli Ambassador to New Zealand?

    Elizabeth Eastmond, Waiheke

  11. Noone wants to disrespect the poor buggers who got shot to pieces, gassed, poisoned, tortured or were lucky enough to return home to battle PTSD. Its for us to remember the sacrifice and by today’s standards what a bloody sacrifice. Fighting the good cause some might say – while others like Baxter know all too well the politics of it all, the misinformation, the coercion; and lets face it, a youthful naivety that, well, doesn’t quite grasp that combat involving bullets, bombs and steel bayonets can never come to any good, other that one side usually gains victory at a cost, for both sides, never imagined. And behind it all the old standard, Gold, Glory and Guns.

    I haven’t missed an ANZAC service for years. Left to myself I couldn’t face it but I go out of respect for my 95yo mother-in-law, still alive and in good health, who lost her father at Monte Casino. Those from that era are mostly all gone – if they indeed survived the ordeal – and those of Gallipoli and the Western Front well gone. It’s good that we remember them all least we forget – as a lesson to ordinary folk, politicians, those who profit from ammunitions, and the top brass in the armed services alike.

  13. Useful background for older as well as younger people to kkeep in mind as to reasons for some strong feelings that have perhps only belatedly been stirred and expressed.

    https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2504/S00051/quiet-mutiny-the-us-army-falls-apart.htm Quiet Mutiny: The U.S. Army Falls Apart Apr.24/25
    …John Pilger’s first film “Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny”, aired in 1970. “The war is ending,” Pilger said, “because the largest, wealthiest and most powerful organisation on earth, the American Army, is being challenged from within – by the most brutalised and certainly the bravest of its members. The war is ending because the Grunt is taking no more bullshit.”…
    At the time, Granada Television’s chairman was apoplectic that it went to air at all and described Pilger as “a threat to Western civilisation”. So tight is the media control we live under now it is unlikely such a documentary would air at all on a major channel…

    Huge effort goes into attacking truth-tellers like Pilger, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, but as Phillip Knightley pointed out in his book The First Casualty, Pilger’s work was amongst the most important revelations to emerge from Vietnam, a war in which a depressingly large percentage of journalists contented themselves with life in Saigon and chanting the official Pentagon narrative. Thus it ever was.
    Pilger was like a fragmentation device dropped into the official narrative, blasting away the euphemisms, the evasions, the endless stream of official lies. He called the end of the war long before the White House and the Pentagon finally gave up the charade;…

    Race politics was another important factor. African Americans were sent to the front in disproportionately large numbers – about a quarter of all frontline fighters. There was a strong feeling among black conscripts that “This is not our war”. Black militancy, epitomised in the slogan attributed to Muhammad Ali, “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger”, resonated with this group.
    In David Loeb Weiss’ No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger we see a woman at an antiwar protest in Harlem, New York. “My boy is over there fighting for his rights,” she says, “but he’s not getting them.” Then we hear the chant: “The enemy is whitey! Not the Viet Cong!” We should recall that at this time the civil rights movement was battling powerful white groups for a place in civil society. The US army had only ended racial segregation in the Korean War and back home in 1968 there were still 16 States that had miscegenation laws banning sexual relations between whites and blacks. Martin Luther King was assassinated this same year. All this fed into the Quiet Mutiny…
    Opinion: Eugene Doyle

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