The scandal over sex tapes involving a female soldier has damaged the reputation of one of Australia’s most venerable institutions. So I would like to put in a word for Bob Ellis. It is always interesting to watch a certain faction of left-liberalism — Marieke-Hardy perennials one might say — go nuts when Ellis goes off-message. The left-liberal assumption — roughly, that life is a matter not simply of equality, but of identicality, that men and women are exactly the same, save junk placement, that gay marriage, as an idea, is not even a tiny tiny bit ridiculous — is so all-encompassing that no-one can recognise Ellis for what he is: a Tory radical of the old school, a Chestybondsbelloc, a zaftig Swift.

Ellis is a man who believes in socialism, for example, for what it would conserve: a distinctive Australian way of life. He thinks certain things therefore, should stay in place, ie. certain gender roles. One wonders if the people who read Bob Ellis ever read Bob Ellis. Have they not noticed what he says about abortion? About Julia Gillard’s ability to represent average Australia as a single childless political fembot?

Admittedly his ADFA piece on The Drum went into some very strange territory (I bet even now he remains proud of the article but is, as do we all from time to time, in his study, clutching his eyebrows and going “arggghh, oh fuck why did I do that?” over one or two paragraphs).

Yet at its core was a central contradiction of the matter: how do you maintain a standing army — an institution relying on obedience and a degree of brutalisation — in an era when individual rights seem to us not merely good things to have, but essential to our being? How can you have an army at all, if the authority which welds it together is criss-crossed with other forms of authority, residing in civilian institutions?

The short answer is, you can’t. For decades, the central motif of the army, of surrendering your judgement and life to a larger body — embodied in the old recruiting phrase, ‘For King and Country’ — has been losing its power. Western armies now recruit by making the forces look like a mix between a TAFE, a paintball weekend, and Club Med — they’re all about what you will get out of the experience.

When you put that individual conception at the heart of recruitment, you’ve already given the game away. Of course people won’t just suck it up, and soldier on. But if you don’t sell the forces that way, no-one will join. Every Western army is about 25-30% below even the minimal recruitment targets they set for themselves. The army’s dilemma is not dodgy s-x tapes, or gender-mixing. It’s that we no longer believe, as a society, that we can quarantine a whole institution and suspend the normal rules of rights, non-violence, bodily integrity, etc. And we no longer believe that, because we no longer believe in the uses to which they’re being put, or that their main purpose is defence.

Speaking of atrocities, it brings us to the Mau Mau, the Kenyan rebels who rose up against British colonialists in the 1950s. Mau Mau fighters killed about thirty white civilians in visceral atrocities , and became the stuff of British nightmares; all the Brits did was drive a quarter of the population into concentration camps, and murder, torture and castrate thousands of them, in an attempt to impose a paternalistic ‘transition’ to self-rule, which involved a proposed assembly of white planters, with a non-voting ‘advisory’ body of ‘natives’. Had Kenyan leaders accepted that, the place would have become another Rhodesia.

This standing contradiction of the self-flattering anglo idea, that its decolonisation process was lily-white, was put to rest several years ago by Caroline Elkins in her account of the period, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. The work won a Pulitzer, but it was pilloried in the UK by the imperial fantasists — writers like the historian Andrew Roberts, or columnist Simon Heffer, whose hysterical reaction to any halfway truthful account of the British empire conveys their desperate need to live inside a memory of it. Now they have nowhere to go — the UK Foreign Office has ‘found’ thousands of files relating to the period. They not only meticulous documenting the process of detention, torture, and death, but also make clear that all this was known about at the highest level.

Of particular note is the prevalence of castration, a common process among colonial suppression — a hysterical response itself to the challenge to white masculinity by black people — universally known as ‘boys’, not men, and even w-w-w-w-omen — asserting their full humanity. The imperial fantasists’ reaction is a faint echo of that hysteria.

The revelations will be a fresh blow to the Churchill cult. The preceding Attlee government was not exactly in a rush to give up the non-Indian parts of the empire, and imposed brutal suppression in Malaya and elsewhere. But in Kenya, and British Guiana, and elsewhere, the Churchill-Eden government imposed untold violence and damage in a desperate attempt to slow the decolonisation process by decades. It was the final act of a man whose capacity to f-ck up other, non-white, peoples’ lives across half a century was pretty substantial. Over the next decades, as World War II dies away as the overarching moral fable of our time, the cult will get a thorough revision. It may begin early, should the foreign office find one file in particular — that of a man named Obama, a goat herder who had become a cook, and then a suspected ‘agitator’ and was detained and brutalised, with resulting permanent injuries. Sixty years later his grandson, as one of his first acts as President, returned a bust of Churchill to storage, from its point of display in the White House. And who can blame him?

Churchill, The Army…. ah it must be Anzac Day again, that time of the year when we remember the day we, as one, said ‘Hey! Turks! Hands off the Pacific!’. The routine has become as ritualised as Christmas by now: someone publishes an article revising the generally held belief that Gallipoli was a folly, waste of life etc, the question of who should march is revisited. The revisionist article this time around was published by Ross Cameron in The Age, arguing that no, it wasn’t futile: the aim was to save the Tsar! Ah, well, that’s alright then.

The ‘who marches?’ controversy has been supplied by a proposal to allow Vietnamese-Australians who fought with the NLF (or ‘Viet Cong’) to march on the day, in the same manner as Turkish-Australian descendants do now. This produced a spitting fulmination from Hal G. P. Colebatch in The Oz to the effect that the NLF didn’t deserve the honour, because some killed and tortured prisoners (and opposing Vietnamese civilians, though they don’t get much mention by Colebatch).

Considering that Western troops killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, obliterated whole villages, and brought agriculture to the brink of collapse by 1969, all in service to a war started to prevent the election of Ho Chi Minh as President in 1956, the question is probably whether these brave, if ruthless, freedom fighters should be obliged to march beside veterans representing an army that was war-criminal at a collective level.

But the more general question is what anyone is marching for, if veterans of bitterly fought wars are marching together, as if it was no more than the aftermath of a state-of-origin match. Surely you either have a march to commemorate a fight you thought was meaningful on its own terms, or you have some other type of ceremony of less military aspect to mark the sorrow of war, and its effect on soldiers and civilians alike.

Anzac has always been a passing strange parade. The event which it commemorates was designed in order that Australians would have some military blooding to bind them together — Billy Hughes was explicit on this fact, arguing again and again that nations were only made by blood and war. So we went, in part, to have the ceremony whereby we would express our collective sorrow at the tragic loss. Until World War II, Anzac was, like all such ceremonies, an expression of empire and race. After World War II it began to acquire its focus on mateship and shared sacrifice.

By the 1970s, though it had become a piss-up, it was well on the way to being defined therapeutically, as a ‘chance to bond, searing experience etc etc’. It was also challenged with the WAR (‘Women Against Rape’) mounting charges against the march to try and disrupt and point to the absence of concern for civilian,particularly female, casualties (perhaps the veterans of W.A.R will be invited to march too).

People had though the march would die out, but by the 1990s it had become something else, as people started to march with the medals and the insignia of their departed grandfathers. In some cases, the medal-holders themselves had stopped marching long before they died, or had never marched — and their actual feelings about the wars they were in have become secondary to the larger cause of creating a self-conscious nationalist celebration, in a world increasingly devoid of opportunities for collective celebration.

But the white imperial outpost that the day celebrated is long gone, and the poly-cultural society we have now is exactly what they fought against; it demands that we include the descendants of former enemies, sending the whole thing into spinning incoherence. The very problems we run into in commemorating it make visible that which we are trying to hide behind a big parade — that we are different country with no real relationship to the one that the ANZAC’s shipped out of a century ago. It’s time someone — church, community etc groups — organised some alternative focus on the day, a gathering not a parade, where people from every walk of life, could come together to remember all the dead, and reflect on the pity of war.