ANZAC Day 2026 – Lest we remember

Anzac Day should be more than ritual and rhetoric. It should be a reckoning — with sacrifice, colonialism, class, nationalism and the wars we still seem determined to repeat.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

We promise the dead that we won’t forget them or their sacrifice.

For a juvenile culture and immature country like NZ, attempting to comprehend the magnitude of our slaughter; the contemptible way Māori were treated on returning from war; the lack of support services for those mentally scarred; the sacrifice of pacifists and the pointless murder of our own brutal invasions is more akin to unblinking sheep nervously stepping into the Louvre Museum to study contemporary Art.

We simply lack the sophistication to even begin to ask those questions.

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

What are we really remembering?

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

We always make the same mistakes.

Right now we have a Government siding with war criminals.

This ANZAC Day it feels like we are desperately searching for the meaning in horror, like a wilful forgetting in exchange for hollow gestures.

Haven’t we grown up as a country that 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?

The poetry of war tells the truth politics won’t

The Gunner’s Lament

A Māori 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