‘Lest We Forget’ Means ‘Lest We Forget the Horrors of War’

Cover: via https://melbacg.au

In white Oceania, 25 April is a predictable ritual of patriotic chauvanism, as born-to-rule moneyed big knobs endlessly exploit the historical tragedy of the First World War to boost militarism and fetishise (other people’s) sacrifice for the glory of national cliques. Also served are the quarterly dividends of the corrupt aristocracy of wealth whose idea of society is a labour-camp and an extraction machine for their own self-aggrandisement.

To this end, we are warned of the dangers of what might happen ‘Lest We Forget’ the jaundiced and politicised readings of history. In a nation without a First Nations treaty like Australia, reading history politically remains a national pasttime–a habit typically reinforced every ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) Day.

In an atmosphere of resurgent fascism, as the middle class throw a totalitarian tantrum over the wheels falling off the bandwagon of endless upward mobility trying to operate on a finite planet, ‘Lest We Forget’ becomes a signal for collective paranoia. ‘If we forget our indoctrination, the skies will fall, the terrorists will blow us all up and the Muslims will force us all to pray to heathen gods while they take away our bacon,’ seems to be the mentality.

Needless to say, however, in glorifying militarism, aggression and death, this politicised version of ‘Lest We Forget’ is the exact opposite of everything the phrase was originally meant to mean. In the aftermath of WWI, it meant ‘Lest We Forget the Horrors We Have Just Been Through Lest We Allow Unscrupulous Politicians and Manipulators to Drag Us Into Another.’ Considering the fact that Australia is a vassal state for one genocidally totalitarian regime when it’s imitating one of Nelson Muntz’s minions for the US, it is clear we forgot.

Again, hardly surprising considering the attitude of Australians to history in general. We do as good a job of forgetting history that falls outside the purview of ‘smoothing the pillow for a dying race‘:

The recouperation of the message of ANZAC Day by Laborite militarists and war pigs on the take is part and parcel of a system based on inter-class structural violence. For all its ideologically-driven clamour and bourgeois hoofwank about consent and free contract, Australia was founded on the fait accomplis of violent conquest.

Underneath the exterior of affected complacency, then, we have always been a very violent, selfishly conservative and viciously individualistic society . An imperialist society set against itself by class, dominated by a class of propertied born-to-rule control freaks, needs to be able to virtue-signal values it doesn’t live, like community solidarity, sacrifice of selfish ego needs to the common good, and the sacredness of anything other than Self.

This is demonstrably the actual, practical purpose of ANZAC Day. The ahistorical narratives around the birthday of the national clique are a perennial attempt to make causality and history convenience the ideological assumptions imposed on the continent by ball and musket; the perpetrator must reverse victim and offender and recast the harms of colonialism as a benefit to the victims: You all have McDonalds and 7/11 now, what are you complaining about. The perpetrator must recouperate the narrative to recouperate political legitimacy.

It is hardly a coincidence that this narrative rolls around as the governing junta reduces the entire country to a vassal of another predatory European colonial regime in the midst of imperialist aggression and genocide–much less that it takes place within the context of a nationwide domestic violence crisis. In this, the recouperation of ‘Lest We Forget’ itself demonstrates exactly what we were being warned against.

It seems we forgot.