It is time Anzac Day was replaced

The war had become a mincing machine. The High Command on either side seemed to be clueless. This did not stop our prime minister (Billy Hughes) from trying to introduce conscription. His crazy logic was: we know it has been a mistake, but many of your countrymen are under fire - and so should you be.

In Britain where there was conscription, conscientious objectors were treated as criminals. Some were executed. Shell-shock was offhandedly diagnosed as cowardice. The focus on glory and honour blinded authority to the grotesque scale of its own immorality.

There had been a clash of politicians and they pushed their country’s naïve young men into the ring to settle the issue for them with a clash of arms. When our unknown soldier was shipped off to war he was being exploited. If he was looking down from Heaven on the ceremony on Armistice Day 1993, he would feel that he was still being exploited.

Of course the soldier in the casket had to be described as a hero. Even if the prime minister did not believe what he was saying, the soldier could not be described to an audience enjoying a delusion as being the victim of a confidence trick by his own murderous government.

Implied on Anzac Day is that we were noble and our enemies were not

This sends a very wrong message to our children.

Behaviour during war has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the prevailing circumstances. The more resentful of his situation a soldier feels, the less sympathy he has for the enemy. Propaganda ensured that the ordinary soldier believed that a victorious enemy would take revenge against the defeated soldier’s family.

As any declaration of war automatically opens the door to brutality, there seems to be little point in condemning it when it occurs thereafter.

We need a day set aside to remind us that war is the ultimate human failure

This would be the day when we hear speeches about suffering and destruction of property and not about noble sacrifice.

We would be reminded of the hacking coughs and trembling hands suffered by our returned soldiers in the decades following 1918. We would be reminded of the civilians who were firebombed in Tokyo and Dresden in 1945. We would be reminded of the four million Iraqi refugees now in Syria and Jordan and the landmines still maiming in South-East Asia. The list can go on. We would even be made aware that more American veterans of the Vietnam War have now committed suicide than were killed in that war.

Anzac day is a day of delusion. It is a day of marches and bands and flags and talk of heroes by important people on podiums. We have created a day of celebration of nationhood when we need a day of recognition that war is nothing but the ultimate human failure.