There are a couple of times of year where I really reflect upon identity. Who am I? Where did I come from? What is the cultural heritage I’ve inherited, which I inhabit, which I might nurture and pass on?
As an Australian, the most sacred day to do that is probably the 25th of April: Anzac Day. It doesn’t trouble me that no one celebrates it in Manchester, where I live. I haven’t attended this sort of ceremony (or its counterparts in the UK on Remembrance Sunday) since I was a child. I reflect quietly and privately.
The last few years I’ve been increasingly troubled by cognitive dissonance. Reflecting upon my cultural heritage, my identity, and what I see around me. Perhaps it’s been longer. I can’t say for sure.
It was at its most gut-wrenching and obvious in 2020. In the UK we celebrated VE Day: and although the government urged us to keep our distance, some street parties went on as if there were no pandemic. Around the same time, cries arose from the margins, about how we should let the ‘boomer remover’ run its course, let them die, so people could return to the pub (such was often the refrain here).
It was often the same people raucously celebrating victory who were indifferent to the survival of those who remained (or, indeed, their children).
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we remembered that they were inconvenient.
But it’s not just about that particularly abysmal low point. Every day my cognitive dissonance continues to grow.
I’m starting to wonder how much of this we ever meant. Everything that was drilled into me as a child, from the basic civics to the sweeping semi-mythical stories about western civilisation: its might and its majesty. Things that are de rigeur and also things that I absorbed quite by accident. (And I’ve been saying this for awhile now, in various ways. But for me it’s exquisitely painful in late April)
When I think of Anzac Day, I think of the Australian concept of ‘mateship’. There’s an idea in Australia that this is uniquely Australian. I can’t say for sure: I rather doubt it.
What I mean by ‘mateship’ is standing alongside your peers, chipping in. Caring about the group and its members more than yourself. Caring about a wider cause – if not those who lead it. (That’s the larrikinism.) Putting in a bit of hard yakka – hard work.
I know that my concept of mateship is not one my great-grandparents would have recognised. Australia in the early 20th century was a very different place (as was Lancashire, where one of them hailed from). Women were not included, nor foreigners, nor indigenous Australians. Absolutely not anyone who was less than entirely heterosexual. Even if I were male, I likely would have been excluded on the grounds of my post-secondary education and the crime of being a ‘city slicker’ (rather than a bushie or a townie). My sense is that it was a very working-class phenomenon: think Jimmy Barnes’ classic anthem, Working Class Man. (Apologies to my international audience)
Cultural ideals shift. We change. I make no apologies for wanting to aspire to mateship, even if I would have never been included in its form in the colonial era or early days of federation. I cling to my version of it, as a version that can exist in a pluralistic society. (I also note that the rural, blue-collar, Anglo-Irish imagery cannot be reconciled with the reality of Australia’s current demographics.)
My idea of mateship retains caring about a group, a wider cause, and the hard yakka. And it’s an aspiration for me. I don’t know how others feel about this, or their own cultural ideals. Whether they feel their own drive to do better, based on the stories of their youth and their homeland. I can tell you I fail repeatedly, in spite of myself. To take another part of my heritage, my upbringing: For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try.
I’ve long wondered – and not dared to say it out loud before – if the Second World War has become an opiate of the masses. Something we can point to. Not as a warning of the depths of human depravity or indeed the acts of a desperate people drowning under punitive war reparations. But as a way to claim our own moral superiority.
History is never that black and white. Never that simple. And no, of course I am not condoning the horrific actions of the National Socialist Party. Nothing excuses that.
But if we view it like an action film, a story simplified and sanitised to be just another cops and robbers, we risk losing the meaning and the lessons of history. It isn’t there to make us feel better about ourselves. It’s not there for us to observe patterns in human behaviour, either – but that might be a little more useful.
(I have often been surprised, as a student of ancient Greek history, by people’s reactions to said history. They deny the messy bits, as though I were insulting their family. They seem to want to see brilliant shining marble, intellectual heights, tenuously constructed echoes in their own lives. Such things are largely fictions. I focused on much messier things – not because they were admirable, but because they were interesting.)
What are the warning signs of fascism, of authoritarianism? What were the things present in the early 20th century that aided the rise of Hitler? Were they present in allied countries as well, and how were these impulses tamed, obscured, or annihilated?
I know others more qualified than me are looking, and I know they’re concerned. I lack the expertise to comment confidently, but words like human animals make my skin crawl (along with other dehumanisation of refugees in particular). We condemn the bombing of some civilian infrastructure, but not others. Some of the rich and powerful are once again playing with eugenics, and others are discussing total abandonment of the most vulnerable. And we still claim, as a collective ‘west’, to be morally superior, pointing to a human rights tradition many would like to ignore or abolish.
And once again, those who most vociferously celebrate Remembrance Day are so often among the worst perpetrators (or their greatest supporters). I can’t fathom how one can stand at a Cenitaph, publicly displaying veneration for the Second World War, while embodying what we were supposed to have defeated. I certainly can’t fathom how they sleep at night.
I once quipped on Twitter that while those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, those who do study history are doomed to a life with their head in their hands.
We live in interesting times. We can’t handle it impaired. We need to wake from our slumber, crawl through the throes of withdrawal, and examine ourselves soberly. Come to grips with who we are, and who we might be at risk of becoming.
Lest we forget.
Such good points, Amy. Thanks for posting.