Commemoration reticence

I must admit that I am irritated at the constant media attention to the one-hundredth year anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign and the almost unquestioned assumption that this event marked the birth of the nation. While the pointless tragedy of the campaign may have given Australians pause when thinking of loyalty to England, and thus helped us detach ourselves from our colonial past, it is difficult to see the connection between the national character and the event. The experience of "the band of brothers" in battle is surely not confined to Australians fighting abroad. Men who share danger are universally bound together. So it is a far reach to see values such as mateship and self sacrifice as forged from uniquely Australian experiences.

A new history wars has began over this led by a group calling itself Honest History that challenges the myth of national identity. The point is made that commemorations serve a political agenda, one that is difficult to argue against, given that it involves the death of so many young men and any demurral appears callus and unfeeling.

It is significant that the idea of sacrifice is at the centre of memorialisation of war. The logic is simple. These men made the "ultimate sacrifice" so that we could live in freedom; a logic that holds even for WW1 during which Australian shores were never threatened by an enemy. This understanding is reflected in the speech given by the Minister of Veteran Affairs at Lone Pine this year: "As our nation enters its most important commemorative period, no Australian now or forever, must ever forget that the freedoms we enjoy today were paid for in blood nearly 100 years ago." This is nothing less than the establishment of a civil religion meant to claim the imagination of the nation to perpetuity.

By positing the birth of national identity and freedom on the beaches of Gallipoli we automatically discount the real history and formation of the nation. This is to be found in the history of settlement, the journeys of exploration, and all that is held in geography, sociology, politics, religion, science and economics. Why, I wonder, do we insist that the birth of the nation is associated with a military disaster? Australia was never born out of war, we have never had a robust military culture as exists in America and existed in Prussia before WW1. I hesitate to say it but there is something religious in our focus on a blood sacrifice that in the Christian context is not exactly healthy.

I have a hunch that the increased popularity of Gallipoli commemoration is due to a thirst for religious experience; to stand before something grave and terrible that dwarfs our petty interests. We experience transcendence. It does not matter, therefore, that the myth of national identity is a fraud, the feelings are real and feeling is at the centre of religious experience.

My problem with this is that while being reminded of awful death and waste does produce deep feelings, it is not obvious where it leaves us. It is like living in a perpetual Good Friday. Morals can be struck from the experience but they have to be couched in terms of a quid pro quo and we know that such a deal is only burdensome. It kills us with duty and guilt.

Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the deep North. is an antidote to the over-reach of the centenary and the general hand waving about its importance. Here is an interpretation of a very dark event that involved Australian soldiers on the Burma railway. While history will give us the facts, it is the novelist who can tease out the meaning of such an event.

We find, for example, that reliance upon national character, British pluck, for example, was short lived, as was muscular Christianity. The spirit of Japan only led to more and more cruelty. The brutality of the Japanese, the diseases of starvation, the forced work without rest, the fecund jungle conditions that supported tropical ulcers, malaria, beri beri, pellagra, cholera and gangrene broke men down and killed them regardless of national pride or religious belief. There was no thought of sacrifice, only the day-to-day grind of survival.

Flanagan tells the story from the view of Australian POWs and their Japanese guards. The sole reason that thousands of lives were lost building the railway was that the Emperor willed it. The faulty logic of the task that asked the impossible, that a railway be built by hand in a tropical climate by men reduced by starvation and disease snags in the mind. It was here that the Japanese commanders relied on the Spirit of Japan that they were sure would triumph over their lesser enemies whose chief offence was to survive capture.

Emperor worship is exposed as an absolute monotheism to which all humanity was to be sacrificed. This is how the commanders rationalised their brutality. It was an honour to die for the emperor. Absolute monotheism breeds dehumanisation because humanity is nothing before it. We have had our fill of it in the twentieth century. What was National Socialism in Germany, or the Communist state in Russia, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia but a kind of absolute monotheism/hegemony that slaughtered millions on the altar of an idea? Each of these movements defied rationality and the nature of the real world was their undoing.

I wonder if the dark events in the history of the church, the crusades, the witch-hunts, the pogroms against the Jews and the inquisition occurred under the shadow of just such an absolute monotheism. Did the church lose the gentle Galilean in its rush to cling to orthodoxy or to safeguard the Church? Did the theology of the Trinity that included Jesus in the godhead, fail?

The great strength of The Narrow Road is that it follows the protagonists to their deaths in the years after the war. Nakamura, the Japanese commander, tries to become a good man, a father and a husband. He is haunted by monsters and it is only during his last days dying of throat cancer that his pretence at goodness deserts him. He dies viciously attacking his devoted wife and daughters who attend him. A bad death for one who thought that life and death were indistinguishable.

Dorrigo Evans is the central Australian character in the camp. Modelled, perhaps after Weary Dunlop, he is a medical officer and negotiator with the Japanese regarding the welfare of the POWs. Dorrigo knew what being a leader means and knew that the fate of the men under his command relied on his character. There is one scene in which his men give him a steak, part of a windfall from a slaughtered cow. Looking at the steak his mouth ran with saliva because he, like his men, was starving. He insisted, against every natural impulse that the meat be taken and shared with those in the hospital. He knew that if he had eaten it his status among the men would have been reduced. He defied the British officer class who relied on special treatment from the Japanese and was determined to be one with the men he commanded. Perhaps this is a genuine aspect of Australian character; egalitarianism in extreme.

While he demonstrated great strength of character on the Line, Dorrigo found that he was lost in the post-war civilian world. He was a husk of a man, was serially unfaithful to his wife and hungry for status. The character that he demonstrated among the POWs did not negotiate well the trivialities of peacetime life. His experience in the war did produce wisdom although it was a wisdom that did not seem to help. In a remarkable passage this is spelled out in a conversation with his wife Ella:

He thought of how the world organises its affairs so that civilisation every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life. And how people accept this either by ignoring it and calling it current affairs or politics or wars, or by making a space that has nothing to do with civilisation and calling that space private life. And the more in that private life they break with civilisation, the more that private life becomes secret life, the freer they feel. But it is not so. You are never free of the world; to share life is to share guilt. Nothing could wash away what he felt.

This is very close to the Christian doctrine of universal depravity. Even this man who behaved in a fashion that discounted his own life for the lives of the men he commanded had to admit: "to share life is to share guilt." Being a war hero did not exempt him, he did not emerge from the conflict a free or whole man. The brotherhood forged in war is a great thing but it does not mean that human frailty and self-deception are erased. It does not remove one from guilt. It is just this that is lost when we sentimentalise the experience of war, let alone find in it the forging of the national character. This can only lead us back to the jingoism of the Japanese commanders who believed that their national character was superior to all others.

The novel is, among many things, about guilt and the impotence of any kind of justice. The emperor is not hanged; many of the commanders escape the justice of the Americans while an insignificant guard is put to death. But each man has to deal with what happened. Some are driven mad, some come to wisdom and some live in an unreal world. The experience of both the brutal and the brutalised must be dealt with in some way. This realisation dissolves the distinction between the good and the evil and makes the dealing out of justice problematic.

Reading Flanagan's book is a great way to come close to the realities of war and its aftermath. The book is an attempt to expose not just awfulness, it is an attempt to plumb the spiritual realities of men on both sides of the conflict.

I have never attended an ANZAC day ceremony because I felt that a different god was being worshipped than the God I worship each Sunday. Perhaps we should examine the identity of this god to see what we serve? I can understand wanting to preserve in memory all of the lives lost in war just as we remember our own dead who died of natural causes. But if that act of remembrance is used to bolster our national pride, or is understood as the source of national character, then I have a problem because the idea of sacrifice is linked to salvation.

Is the sacrifice of young men in war to be compared to the sacrifice of Christ? More to the point, is that sacrifice understood as displacing the sacrifice of Christ? If so, what form does salvation take? Is that the same as nation building?

There is no salvation in war, even in victorious war, let alone a defeat. In the novel, Nakamura and Dorrigo Evans are not saved; their lives are destroyed. This is the reality that our sentimentality masks; broken bodies, broken minds, shared guilt. The use of dead soldiers to build an image of national character can only establish a hegemony that ties us to a myth of sacrifice. This is not good news, civil religion never is.