Compulsory Anzac Day services an attack on freedom

Forcing children to participate in school Anzac Day services is an attack on freedom and should be made illegal, writes Tom Tanuki.

WHEN I WAS a little boy, forced to attend Anzac Day services at gunpoint, I used to stand in my school uniform during the minute’s silence, getting into the mood by imagining Saving Private Ryan scenes. I’d imagine them in black and white and backed by sad pianos and violins, which would make the thoughts sad and cool, because that’s what it seemed like you were supposed to do.

So I’d picture GI Joe leaping into a muddy trench or Rambo blowing off heads before getting his own head blown off. Pew, pew! Blam, blam! Or Guile from Street Fighter, crying while holding his dead Sarge in his arms. Boo hoo! Tinkle tinkle. Bam!

Basically, I’d use any cartoon or video game character I knew who looked like they should be in a war. This was how 5-year-old Tom would make himself get Anzaccy.

If it was 1920 and my dad was a dead or deployed dog soldier, I wouldn't have needed to imagine Rambo to get into the vibe. But I grew up in the '80s and by then, Australia was in full “Herald Sun Commemorative Edition Anzac Digger Pin Collection” mode. It was a mood ripe for co-opting by John Howard just a generation later, as he did, to help Australians mainline more nationalism and let conservatives win more elections.

ANZAC legend still inspiring politicians to send Australians to the slaughter

As long as Australia clings to the ANZAC legend of romanticising war, politicians will find excuses to involve our country in foreign conflicts.

I wonder if my sad GI Joe trench imaginings were thought crimes? Perhaps they should have shot or deported me. I still don't know what else adults actually expect a 5-year-old boy to think about during an Anzac service.

I reckon many people would attest to having some sort of similar childhood experience to me, if they were being honest; until they grew up enough to either “get it” or not, anyway. Whatever “getting it” entails. I know that the day is a very different experience for families who have or had people in active service, alive or dead; but for many of us, that’s not the case.

And for many of us, I think of that process as a kind of nationalist childhood conditioning. Which I think is a form of child abuse. I also think making that abuse mandatory is an attack on freedom of expression.

Those are my opinions. You can shoot me or deport me if you’d like, but you can’t stop me from having thought them.

Now in my 40s, I have had a lifetime’s fill of Australia’s nationalist ritual calendar. Chief among the rituals is Anzac Day, our “yearly pageant of national necrophilia” as it was once described.

The preparatory rites for the day involve our dying, useless legacy media competing with an army of social media influencers to find the best woman, Muslim and/or child to sacrifice for not being patriotic enough. Once they’ve been ritually sacrificed to the Dead Anzacs for incorrect free expression, White Australians can continue to love their country for another full cycle of the moon. A wonderful tradition.

In my youth, I idealistically hoped I could help kill this rubbish off forever, but I have gradually accepted that I can only bitterly complain about it while I’m here. It will end for me only when I myself am gone from the world – blessed release! – or when Armageddon arrives to incinerate every News Corp office and melt every racist’s smartphone and face into a puddle.

But sometimes, the Anzac Day beat-up rituals manage to pierce my overarching fatigue.

Anzac Day: One day, may no one march there at all

Not all Australians reflect on Anzac Day the same way, with some seeing the day as a celebration of the horrors of war.

For example:

The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail et al are flapping their arms because Sydney primary school Sherwood Ridge Public School has given its students the option to either attend or skip a pre-school holiday Anzac Day service.

A group of their students are Exclusive Brethren members, so it goes, and as a rule, Exclusive Brethren do not participate in war commemoration. Because the school allowed those students to choose to not attend, it eventually extended the option to all their families in the interest of fairness.

So the Daily Tele gathered a bunch of the usual quotes from veterans, an ex-veterans’ affairs minister and several Facebook groups (which is obviously where legacy media steals these stories from).

Shrill condemnations of the school’s decision ensued:

I’m disgusted!

To acknowledge what our forefathers fought for, to ensure we’re a country that remains free is to be respected.

It really is an insult to the families of the 100,000 who died for this country. They can’t opt out of their mourning, so I don’t know why someone would want to opt out of this.

It’s not glorifying war, it’s teaching students to honour those who fought for our and their freedom.

All this waffle about sacrifice and freedom is like sitting through Catholics explaining transubstantiation and the shared divine essence of the Holy Trinity. As impenetrable and stupid as it’s ever been, defiant to any semblance of clarity. You’re not supposed to get it. You just repeat it angrily to tell off us unpatriotic deviants.

Anzac religion unfitting in multicultural Australia

The Anzac legend encompasses predominantly White Australian history with little significance to the nation's Indigenous or immigrants.

A Daily Telegraph editorial opines on the matter:

On the face of it, this appears to be a straight-up example of free speech. As such, those students should not be compelled to join an activity their families cannot tolerate.

But freedom of expression is surely dependent on the availability and understanding of precise and accurate information — otherwise, it is baseless and probably even pointless. And this is where the Daily Telegraph believes the dissenting parents are mistaken.

There’s plenty of freedoms in Australian society that some of us might argue aren’t the best for our collective health. But we accept those risks in what’s at least billed as a free society.

For one, we accept the freedom of other Australians to refuse to vaccinate not only themselves but their children, too. There’s nudge policy to make it harder to do that, but it’s still feasible to live that way. Personally, I think that endangers every poor kid who medically can’t get a jab to a renewed risk of polio or other medieval ailments; but as we all learned over the past five years, forcing people to participate in public health creates a lasting backlash that isn’t worth it.

We accept the freedom of other Australians to take their kids out of the schooling system for a range of reasons, spanning from the completely normal through to the completely unhinged. We try to make sure that homeschooling parents provide a minimum standard of education to their kids, but we can’t do too much to police that.

I just looked at public health and education; they’re really important, but as we’ve seen, they have an optional element to them. Do you know what’s not quite as important? Forcing your five-year-olds to attend a military thought ceremony. But now, the Daily Telegraph tells us, in not wanting to have their kids imagine GI Joe, ‘the dissenting parents are mistaken’ about the spirit of Anzac Day.

Oh, they’re wrong about their freedom of expression, are they?

I have an idea. Why doesn’t the Daily Telegraph just stalk the parents outside the school and doxx them all to name and shame them for their wrongthink, like they did with climate activists outside court in 2022?

Why don’t we sacrifice these parents to the Anzac gods like we all did with Yassmin Abdel-Magied, so that the sun will rise again tomorrow over Australia?

Lest We Forget Yassmin Abdel-Magied

Two years ago Yassmin Abdel-Magied got herself into trouble for saying ‘Lest. We. Forget. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine …’

Here’s my wrongthink opinion:

Every Anzac Day ceremony in the entire country should be optional. It should be illegal for schools, employers or other institutions to make them compulsory. Then, the rest of us can choose not to participate.

And if we’re feeling nostalgic about how bad war is – which I agree is an appropriate way to feel about it – then we can spend our energies on genuine anti-war efforts like agitating against Australia’s arms provisioning of the ongoing and current genocide against Gazans. That’s a better service to the notion of what they say Anzac Day is about than any jingoistic service.

And perhaps you have your own Anzac ancestors to honour and commemorate? Fine. You really must honour them. Or you might be a military history buff? Perhaps you’re just a raging nationalist and you have a hard-on for this kind of thing. Maybe you’re a valour thief and you wear medals you found in an antique shop and pretend they’re your grandad’s.

Or maybe you just enjoy replaying Saving Private Ryan scenes in your head during the minute’s silence after a childhood’s worth of conditioning.

Well, then, you can all go. In your own time. Even if I’m not a big fan of the day, that’s your right.

And don’t worry, I won’t even demand you be shot or deported for it! Not my style. I’m not into sacrifices.

Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.