As the draft Australian history curriculum graphically demonstrates, the academic elite are intent on blackwashing Australia’s history of all things white and Christian. The draft curriculum focuses obsessively on Aboriginal history. Islam is mentioned more than Christianity. White men are only mentioned in the context of violence and oppression.
The elite particularly despise ANZAC Day. Academics sneer at “Anzackery”. Leftists have made ANZAC-bashing their second-biggest day, after Australia, oops, “Invasion” Day. Where BLM were given free reign to march in their thousands, governments and bureaucrats used COVID as a threadbare excuse to all-but ban ANZAC Day.
Why ANZAC Day? Because it represents everything the left hate: patriotism, sacrifice, and the honouring of dead white males. Even worse, its origins are indelibly rooted the very traditional Christian, white Australian culture that the left are working so hard to erase.
There is something undeniably religious about ANZAC Day ceremonies. It has to do with ‘civil’ or ‘civic’ religion which is a concept used to describe solemn public events in the history of the nation. These acts of commemoration occur in all nations regardless of their historically dominant religious culture. They may or may not be officially endorsed by the various churches but whether the ceremonies are held within or outside a sacred building, they are examples of ‘civic’ religion. ANZAC Day is a major Australasian manifestation. In Britain it is Armistice Day, 11 November. In France and elsewhere on the European Continent the war dead are commemorated on the Church’s All Souls’ Day, 2 November. There the link with the Christian faith is quite explicit.
When one attends the dawn service at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, the religious character of the ceremony is most apparent. Padres[…]take turns in leading the prayers and there is always the singing of hymns of at least theistic content. There is a general acknowledgement of the existence of a deity.
This is no coincidence. ANZAC Day originated at a time when Christian belief was near-universal in Australian society. Despite their disdain for overt religiosity, Australians regarded themselves as without question, Christian. Even today, despite the tub-thumping of the porch atheists, Christianity is still the dominant belief for 70% of Australians.
The founder of Australia Day was in fact an Anglo-Catholic Anglican priest, Canon David John Garland. An Irish immigrant, Garland became a high-profile. “very public-spirited” priest in both Australia and New Zealand, where he was appointed to lead a campaign to amend the New Zealand Education Act to allow Bible Study in government schools. When the first ANZAC Day Commemoration Committee (ADCC) in Australia was inaugurated in 1916, Garland was unamimously elected to be its secretary.
Garland became known as the “Architect of ANZAC Day”. His campaigning led to each Australian state and New Zealand officially adopting April 25 (the date was suggested by businessman Thomas Augustine Ryan, who had a son fighting in the Dardanelles). Interestingly, New Zealand, with its single government, adopted the day more expeditiously than Australia, where it had to pass each state government.
Contrary to the mythology promulgated in modern times, the soldiers of WWI and the founders of the ANZAC commemoration very much knew what they were fighting for.
The central element which drove Garland and most other chaplains who served in the AIF during World War I was the conviction that the young men who fell in the service of the imperial cause had died defending truly Christian values. They were modern day crusaders against the scourge of Prussianism. The British Empire, as many at the time firmly believed, stood for genuine Christian principles against the putatively pagan values of the German Empire, to which many sermons from the Anglican hierarchy throughout the Empire bore eloquent testimony.
ANZAC Day is a triumph of grass-roots democracy – one which continues to resist the top-down social engineering of the elites.
It is also evident that at ANZAC Day ceremonies, the attending citizens perceive themselves to be united in some form of devotion which in the first instance is presumably to the memory of those who have paid the supreme sacrifice in the service of their country. People who have lost their kinsfolk in war as well as citizens generally, come out to declare their solidarity with the nation. It is a patriotic event which unites citizens beyond their different religious denominational beliefs for one day of remembrance. The mantra ‘Lest we forget’ sums it up.
Queensland History Journal
The modern, neo-Marxist historian may sneer at “Anzackery”, the anti-religious left can deride the “opiate of the masses”, and woke education bureaucrats can try to erase the “dead white males” from our history, but the dedicated work of the likes of Canon Garland lives on in the people’s hearts. Australians and New Zealanders still gather every April, in the chill autumn pre-dawn. They light their candles by the hundreds of thousands, sing, however badly, Abide With Me, and murmur the solemn words, Lest We Forget.
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