Anzac Day

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”
Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities

Although the author is writing here of the period of the French Revolution, the paradoxes in this passage from Dickens capture, in retrospect, the 1960’s and 1970’s in Australia. Because it was during that era, that Australia underwent its own cultural revolution, the consequences of which we live with today. Indeed, there was launched, through the subversion of our great social institutions – such as the Parliament, the Courts, the Public Service, the Universities, the church and the media – a cultural war; a war equally as destructive as any that we have experienced, but a war having more subtle and enduring outcomes.

In the last thirty years, disaffected and disgruntled pseudo-intellectuals have launched a series of savage attacks on the values of our society, sabotaged our social institutions and set in train widespread brainwashing through media monopolies and academic institutions that endures to this day.

One manifestation of this ideological onslaught on our heritage and traditions was the denigration of Anzac Day, which became fashionable during the Vietnam War. It found its most shameful expression in the vilification of conscripted soldiers who obeyed the conscription laws and served in Vietnam. Not one, it can be taken for granted, wanted to be there. But they did their duty, according to the laws of the land, right or wrong. Their reward was to be denounced by self-anointed cultural watchdogs whose primary allegiance was not to Australia, but to an alien and un-Australian ideology.

A generation of men and women who answered the call and served in Vietnam, and who were refused the march through the streets traditionally accorded to returning soldiers, are emotionally and psychologically scarred as a result of their treatment at the hands of a community too confused by media brainwashing to act out their finer feelings. It was a Goebbelsian achievement on the part of Australia’s monopoly media and, perhaps, the most shameful episode in our history.

Last Sunday, Anzac Day, Australians gave the lie to those cultural warriors who wanted to remake our nation in an atheist and Marxist image.

Throughout the country, citizens of all ages gathered together in celebrating our freedom from tyranny and commemorating those who served and sacrificed their lives to ensure that freedom. There is a resurgence of interest in Anzac Day, there is a desire for community bonding, there is a growing feeling that we cannot go it alone, that “The Government” cannot give us everything that we desire at no cost.

We are learning that there is a price to be paid for everything of value, and that growing recognition bound the Australian community together on Anzac Day to honour those who paid the price for the freedoms that we enjoy today.

There is something else too, about the resurgence of Anzac Day as a deeply significant occasion for Australians. The widespread failure of governments to meet their responsibilities, let alone honour their promises, has brought us back to a new place of beginning. In fact, of course, it is not a new beginning, but rather the old one. But there is a feeling that the pendulum is swinging back again; that the mess made by Governments cowed by political correctness has brought us back to the point where citizens must now re-build the nation.

This is a task that our forefathers achieved and, as we, too, face it, there is a sense of reaching out on Anzac Day to try to establish some sort of spiritual bond with those who went before us; like reaching out to find a foothold in our history to prepare us and encourage us in the task ahead.