War! What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing!

On the 25th of April each year we in Australia and New Zealand commemorate ANZAC Day to honour those men and women who have served their countries in conflicts overseas, and to remember the sacrifice of those who died in the course of those conflicts.

Did they beat the drum slowly, did they sound the fife lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er ye as they lowered ye down?
Did the bugles sing "The Last Post" in chorus?
Did the pipes play the "Floors O' The Forest"?

from Eric Bogle's song No Man's Land

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.

from Laurence Binyon's poem For the Fallen

From the veldt of South Africa, to Gallipoli, to the deserts of North Africa and the Middle-East, to the trenches in Flanders' fields, to the jungles of New Guinea and South-East Asia.

There may have been good reason for the mainly young men who went (and still go) to those foreign places and fight, but with hindsight I wonder how often their sacrifices really made any difference in the long term. This is said not to denigrate their bravery and sacrifice, but rather to question the political processes that lead to various nations and peoples going to war, whether declared or not!

Sure, World War II makes lots of sense with Hitler's Germany set to overrun all of Europe and enslave its diverse peoples. Likewise for Japan in the Asia/Pacific area.

Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam? The Yellow Peril and the Domino Theory!

World War I? Tired old empires, soon to disappear or disintegrate, flexing their aging muscles to increase their power both within Europe and abroad!

Who other than students of history and those old enough to have heard old diggers' stories or who lived through those times in either military or civilian roles, really remembers the passions engendered by the issues of those days!

For me, those times were the late 1960s and early 1970s. The main political issues were the war in Vietnam, conscription to serve overseas, the Domino Theory and the Vietnam Moratorium marches in our major cities.

Certainly many of us who opposed the Australian presence in Vietnam were naive in our attitude to the Vietnamese communists, but the South Vietnamese leadership seemed to almost uniformly be a bunch of brutal thugs. Did we really want to help support that type of government?

And now 30 or so years on, Vietnam is an important trading partner in our region and many of our citizens travel there for enjoyable and cheap holidays. Some of these travellers are former service personnel who served there, but many more are too young to have any personal memories of that time of conflict. I wonder whether these young ones understand or even care about the sacrifices those service men and women made on behalf of their country at that time.

For whichever conflict you can think of there is so much death, so much suffering! All the issues sound so important when the time comes to go to war, but years later who knows or even cares about them?

And so far I've only mentioned the military personnel, but in every conflict there will always be many civilians injured or killed. Often young children or women, maybe the victims of rape or of discarded land mines. At some time in the future this cycle of war then peace, then more war which has continued from time immemorial must be broken. Human beings are not stupid, but seem frequently to miss opportunities to change these and other ancient, but destructive patterns of behaviour.

It is becoming apparent to me that we have to find how to make war a distant memory sooner rather than later, or all humankind will have to face the reality of the destruction of our modern ways of life. War is but one factor, environmental degradation another. All nations and peoples will need to work together to ensure that our world remains fit for habitation, for every type of creature. Cooperation, not belligerence will need to be our catch-cry.

As it is written:

They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

from Isaiah 2:4

Amen! Thus endeth the lesson...