“If people really knew,” former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George remarked during World War One, “the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know, and can’t know.”

In World War One, the overall service casualty rate approached 20% — a one in five chance of dying (and of course a lot more if you were at the front).

By World War Two, it came down to about 7% — one can see on crossroads war memorials how the latter casualties are often a mere footnote to the earlier conflict. Fifty US soldiers a week were killed in Vietnam, and five hundred Australians in toto. That last figure looked small when compared to earlier conflicts. It looks monstrous now, in an era when Parliament stops to remember – as it did yesterday — the lives of two soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Gillard’s and Opposition leader Abbott’s words on Lance Corporal Andrew Jones and Lieutenant Marcus Case were disgusting by being so moving, but above all they showed the strange twilight nature of the war.

Half a century ago, the idea that one would honour fallen servicemen by evoking their “cheeky” personality, their catch phrases, and so on, evoking one soldier’s love of helicopters, another’s barracks room manner would have been viewed as starkly insane.

The whole point about duty is its universality — it doesn’t matter what sort of person you are, you are dignified by your service and sacrifice, if the cause is meaningful. When the cause is meaningless — as the Afghan war has been for a decade now — then the idea of duty is bitter bread, and something else must be evoked.

Thus, with the war’s very low casualties, politicians have hit on another way of selling the war, summoning up not the death of two twenty-something men, or the cause, but their individuality, a hint of their uniqueness. The strategy adapts mourning to the contemporary form by which we mourn the death of the young — one that has evolved over the last two decades, when someone wraps their P plates round a tree.

There’s the flowers and photos at the site, and the post-religious memorial — the speeches, the memorial objects — guitars, shades, a bottle of Jack in the coffin etc — and the songs, with Time of Your Life and Hallelujah leading the pack.

It’s a feature of postmodern culture, the way it folds old modes of living — in which the dead would be honoured with a common service — inside out, because the very nature of social meaning is inside out. It’s why Parliament yesterday resembled a ghastly episode of Australian Idol conducted on the banks of the Lethe, assessing how well these two men did in their short lives to be allowed across the river of forgetting.

The focus is on life, not death, in the manner of Binyon’s poem (they shall not grow old as we that are left shall grow old age shall not weary them nor the years condemn…) to give the sense that they have not really died at all.

The difference now is that the commemoration of war has taken the form of the commemoration of tragic accidents — despite the tacked on sentences about this being a just cause, and so forth, there is no sustained justification of the war from Labor, nor can there be, of this pointless farce.

It is not that we do not know what the war is like back home, as per, Lloyd George, it is that there is no war which presents itself to us, no idea of a real conflict — simply a series of accidents far away, of sufficient low level that each casualty can be personally remembered.

For half a decade, myself and other correspondents here have been pointing out the contradictory, futile, and empty nature of the commitment in Afghanistan, of the absurdity of funding Pakistan’s ISI while fighting its allies, the Taliban, of defending a corrupt Kabul regime laced into the heroin trade, whose product is creating a fresh wave of cheap smack in Western cities.

Now we are being joined by the right-wing establishment, largely because some conservatives want Obama and Gillard to wholly own wars they inherited. For a decade the Right has been willing to sell any lie required to keep these wars going. Their analysis is now ashes, and they bear a heavy responsibility for sending young men and women to wasted pointless deaths on a foreign field.

But the greatest casualty may be the soul of the Labor party, which could once point to a record of judiciously assessing national interest in foreign entanglement, and now spruiks a conflict in order to avoid outflanking in that baddest of badlands — western Sydney — and cannot find one backbencher to say, as did Eddie Ward three quarters of a century ago, “this is the Labor party; we do not export young men for live slaughter.”

Doubtless the latest administrative review will fix up everything, but in the end one can only say, if people knew what the Labor party was really like at the moment, it would cease tomorrow.