I've stayed out of this thread, having said what I wanted to say about Anzac Day on the thread about John Passant's article. However, a couple of corrections are in order:

Boazy - while I'm sure you were delighted that the Dawn Service you attended was conducted in front of a Christian cross, this is in fact quite atypical. Most Anzac Day dawn services are conducted at cenotaphs, which have no religious connotations.

Paul.L - Anzac Day ceremonies are more elaborate nowadays than they used to be: "In more recent times the families and young people have been encouraged to take part in dawn services, and services in Australian capital cities have seen some of the largest turnouts ever. Reflecting this change, the ceremonies have become more elaborate, incorporating hymns, readings, pipers, and rifle volleys."

http://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/anzac/anzac_tradition.asp

Personally, my favourite part of Anzac Day is playing Two Up, but it appears I'm the only one at OLO to have mentioned it.

It’s funny that the multiculturalists feel it’s OK for foreign born or minority sections of the community to have events which aren’t exactly inclusive, yet they’ll happily try and stop ANZAC day. You can always find support from the left for the smallest minority event, but anything that you average Australian reveres, is trashed.

Fire twirling, basket weavers learning pole dancing while knitting? Right on, let find them some funding. Remembering the hundred odd thousand war veterans who fought and died in our name. No way.

Robert

You say >> “As a migrant it was not my country they were defending, claiming to defend nor was it my Empire”

Well if you’re not an Australian you don’t have to pay your respects. But if you are an Australian, then you should know that it is this country they were fighting for.

You say >> Soldiers etc“Nor are they particular paragons of virtue but a pepper and salt mixture of good and evil”

Exactly in the measure that we are, in the general community. They are us. They are our fathers, uncles, brothers and sisters etc with the added courage that it takes to serve.

Steel,

That is the ugliest thing I have heard anyone say on OLO. I hope you are proud. So you know these babykillers yourself? You heard plenty of stories of Aussie soldiers gutting babies? I’d like to see your evidence for this. Presumably you have statistics for the number of babies the Australian soldiers killed?

Its phenomenal how people who have no idea about what they are talking about feel they have the right to cast aspersions like this on the 50 odd thousand people who served Australia in Vietnam.

Put up some evidence or crawl back into your hole you ugly excuse for a human being.

To the rest of the anti-soldier lobby,

“ People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
George Orwell.

Too few of the soft lefties on this thread understand this.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
George Orwell.

Is that it? Is there nothing else? Do we sleep better because (eg) there's a sh*tfight in Iraq right now? There's no anti-soldier lobby Paul. There are those who push for war and those who resist it. Few if any of these brothers, fathers, sons etc. would push for violence. Ask any veteran if they'd opt to do it all again. The insane ones would say yes.

Yeah well. "If soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would remain in the army."
Frederick the Great.

So many great posts here! I wish I could address them all. Suffice to say …

Ginx

Old socialist saying: ‘A bayonet is a blade with a worker at each end.’

Gecko

You are an old and wise soul.

Bronwyn

‘I don't hate everything about Anzac Day and I don't necessarily want to get rid of it. I just hate the circus it's become and the way it affirms war.’

That's an all-important distinction that pro-Anzac believers either can’t or won’t see. Large public commemorations are, by their very nature, affirming. The larger they are, and the more public – the more the affirmation. This is what I have most disliked about the Anzac commemorations of the Howard years.

Jacinta

One statistic you didn’t include was the percentage of posts that criticise the way Anzac Day is handled by the media, churches, military, governments etc, rather than the Day itself.

'Pity we will have to wait another 12 months to vent our spleen.'

I guess that's why they call it 'the one day of the year'.

** STEEL**

You reckon that babies were mutilated in Vietnam by allied troops ?

Where is your evidence ? Who did you serve with, and when ?

I'm a Veteran, and I admit, there are many atrocious incidents that occur in a war zone. Many civilians were casualties. Explosive ordnance does not have the capacity to delineate between friend or foe.

However, in my two tours, I did not see ANY EVIDENCE of unlawful or wilful killing of children, let alone babies. I'm aware that some young people tried to detonate grenades and other IED's in our presence and they were subsequently stopped.

** STEEL ** If I were you I wouldn't want to make those sort of accusations or claims around the Vietnam Vets that I know, lest you experience a fairly 'lusty' response !

Getting over the war is hard enough without some individual comming along with claims that can't be proven. Believe me my friend, we ALL BLEED when we're cut.

Don't be alarmed by Paul L.'s deceptive post. In the entire context of the conflict and the subsequent media exposure of crimes in the war, people were quite within their rights to be outraged and decry returning troops. Unfortunately many soldiers who had no part in such crimes necessarily must have felt victimised by the public.If they had any sense though they would've realised that their allies had degraded and destroyed the image of the soldier/army (if the entire war was not enough to do so at that point) and that the criticism wasn't directed at them per se, but what they represented.

Today this kind of publicity is why they conceal these crimes from the public and censor any media stories coming from conflicts such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

-=-=-=-
http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/mass/lai/dark_5.html

"“She came out of the hut with her baby and Widmer shot her with an M16 and she fell. When she fell, she dropped the baby and then Widmer opened up on the baby with his M16 and killed the baby too,”...

Another soldier, Pfc. Varnado Simpson, shot a woman, a baby. Afterwards, he went into a kind of shock. “The baby’s face was half gone, my mind just went…and I just started killing. Old men, women, children......"

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/myl_bvillagers.htm

"Phuong Thi Moi, 13, and Do Thi Man, 12, were found inside their homes lying naked, their vaginas appearing to have been
savagely ripped open. . .

Do Thi Nguyen, aged 10, was found in Ba Xam's house by her mother, Pham Thi Day, a 45 year old widow who survived
the killings. When Do Vien examined the little girl's body he could clearly see her clothes had been torn off. Her vagina had
been ripped and there was blood all over the area."

-=-=-=

These crimes are by soldiers of the United States of America (further, the elite governments often describe as exemplary), educated in western, democratic society...and disgustingly celebrated and protected there even after these crimes became public (by people such as PaulL.). These crimes could easily never have been reported.