The myths of ANZAC Day

indonesia / philippines / australia | imperialism / war | opinion / analysis Wednesday April 25, 2007 12:22 by Working Class United workingclassunited at gmail dot com

We are a loose network of anarchists located throughout Oceania, who aim to publish regular commentary on society and events from a libertarian communist or syndicalist perspective.

Today we publish a commentary on war and militarism to coincide with ANZAC Day, a day of war glorification in Australia and Aotearoa.

Taken from: http://workingclassunited.googlepages.com/anzac

On April 25th, across Oceania, people in their thousands will line the streets, draped in national flags, to watch the parades of uniformed veterans and their decorated grandchildren proudly marching, to remember how they bravely fought to save the country from foreign perils. Politicians and media figures will fall over each other to see who can heap the biggest praise on soldiers. They will stress the nobility of past conflicts, and the necessity of future wars to protect our freedoms and serve the national interest. Quite what this “national interest” is is not explained.

When politicians talk about the national interest, they really mean the interests of the nation’s business people. When business stops becoming profitable at home, other markets for goods and capital must be found to prevent an economic collapse. As the market expands into other countries, capital will inevitably come into competition with other countries trying to do the same thing. Military force is thus necessary to protect these economic interests. War itself can also shore up the national economy, as vast amounts of resources are diverted into military production. A newly-conquered country provides numerous opportunities for investment, both in the reconstruction of demolished national infrastructure, and through the replacement of the conquered ruling class and its associated businesses, with one subservient to the conquerors. It may also provide access to valuable resources. But a war requires people to fight in it, and business people on either side are loath to do so. The job of fighting and dying inevitably falls to the working class.

Generally, the most that a worker can hope to get from a war, regardless of the side they serve on, is a bullet-wound, some lodged shrapnel, maybe a free wheelchair. If they’re lucky, they may get a pension, depending on the whims of the current government. They certainly won’t get a share in the enormous profits generated by the arms manufacturers, or plundered from the newly-opened markets. So while the ruling classes on both sides have substantial interests in winning wars (by either gaining new markets or successfully defending their existing ones), the workers on both sides have little to gain and their lives to lose.

War serves to keep the working class in line and suppress class struggle. Massive bombing campaigns can completely demoralise the attacked populations, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure means that civilians will readily submit to the wage-system post-invasion, taking any work they can get in order to access the means of survival otherwise denied to them. National sentiment on both sides of a war can bind workers closer to the ruling class, by creating the illusion that workers and rulers share a common interest in fighting the foreign threat.

Celebrations such as ANZAC Day romanticise and glorify war. Such events promote the myth that there is a “national interest”, and give the illusion that working people actually stand to gain something by fighting their rulers’ wars. Such patriotism helps build support for further wars today and prevents us from realising that our interests aren’t actually the same as the bosses. Working people across the world need to realise that we share in the same interests, and that those interests are different to those of our rulers. Workers, regardless of nationality, share the same interests in abolishing the system of wage slavery. We need to reject patriotism and the myth that we benefit from the “national interest”. We should refuse to fight in capitalist wars, and support working people in all nations, who are on the same side as us in the international struggle against exploitation.