‘GALLIPOLI, INC’ HELPS THE DENIAL OF GENOCIDE
Green Left Weekly
April 22 2013
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
By David T. Rowlands
The truth about Anzac Day is that it is as much about denial as it
is about remembrance. It is a denial that functions for both sides
of the original conflict.
The two countries that have invested much energy into sustaining the
Gallipoli industry – Australia and Turkey – also have a genocidal
past. Not coincidentally, both countries have used the device of
“Gallipoli, Inc” to blot out shameful historical memories that they
would rather not address.
One of the central features of the Australian ANZAC myth is that the
“national character” was born as the first landing boats came ashore
in the pre-dawn darkness of April 25, 1915.
Traits that supposedly define the nation were forged and displayed
in the five-day landing battle and the months of trench warfare that
followed. These traits are often summed up with a cliched term that
has been used to cringe-worthy excess in recent years – mateship.
It is true that some admirably stoic qualities were displayed
by Australian troops, like all the troops who were sent by their
respective governments to the Dardanelles. Yet this historical reality
in itself would be no reason to establish a fully fledged civic
religion like the one that grown up in Australia around Gallipoli.
The Anzac death-cult is about much more than due respect for the
fallen. It serves a deeper need – to draw a line in Australian history
and say this is the “glorious page” where it really began. Yet the
military history of White Australia had its inception with the arrival
of British colonisers in 1788. This is an obvious point, but one that
is curiously overlooked in the rhetoric of Anzac Day.
As the 19th century went by, the national character developed
hand-in-hand with the brutal and systematic dispossession of
Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants. Australia’s wars began on
the contested frontiers of this continent, a complex saga of
multi-generational conflict between expansionist whites and resisting
tribal groups.
Battles were fought, massacres carried out. There were casualties on
both sides, though the toll was disproportionately borne by the invaded
rather than the invaders. The end result was the establishment of
British rule and the near-total extermination of Aboriginal Australia.
Although this war was as real as any other historical struggle between
two peoples, it was never acknowledged as such in Australia. Denying
the genocide that accompanied the establishment of European rule over
this country became an unofficial policy and a popular delusion.
By the time of federation in 1901, White Australia openly thought of
the Indigenous people from whom it had wrested the land as a race of
“sundowners”. Herded into miserable reservations under the misnamed
policy of “protection”, they were condemned to die off in obscurity.
This is one of the keys to understanding why Gallipoli was so hungrily
designated the nation’s “baptism of fire” instead of the dirty war
that began in 1788.
Gallipoli was like a far-away arena where a sacrificial contingent
of Australians displayed enough skill and bravery to allow romantic
nationalists like Charles Bean (the official historian and founder
of the Australian War Memorial) to elevate the events of the bungled
and tragic campaign into the realm of myth – where it has stayed
ever since.
At Gallipoli, the Australians, New Zealanders and other Allied soldiers
were the underdogs, the victims, the selfless volunteers who fought
and died for the cause of “freedom”. This is the image we like to
have of ourselves – an image diametrically opposed to the image that
Aboriginal Australia has of White Australia. It is comfort amid the
carnage, attempted absolution by blood.
Anzac Day allows contemporary white Australians, the direct
beneficiaries of the genocidal crimes of our pioneering forebears,
to disown these murderous acts and to ignore the Indigenous underdogs,
the Indigenous victims, of Australian military history.
It is worth remembering that at the time of Gallipoli, massacres of
Indigenous people were still occurring. They were still happening
after WWI ended, such as the barely-remembered 1928 Coniston Massacre
(which perhaps as many as 170 victims) in the Northern Territory.
On the Turkish side, a similar motive propels the rituals of
remembrance. At Gallipoli, runs the official narrative, Turkish troops
fought to defend their homes and families from Allied invasion.
Doggedly resisting the combined might of the British and French
Empires, they saved Turkey from total dismemberment.
Their prolific sacrifice under the inspired leadership of Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk laid the foundation of the modern Turkish state from
the wreckage of the old Ottoman Empire.
This story contains elements of truth, like its counterpart, the Anzac
Myth. Yet its ultimate propaganda function is to draw attention away
from Turkey’s other 1915 campaign – the war of extermination against
the Armenian civilian population.
The Armenian genocide was one of the worst crimes of the 20th century.
Its horrors were so huge that it would be impossible to summarise
them in a few lines. There were mass shooting, mass burnings, mass
drownings, even reports of lethal injections and gassings. Organised
death marches into the desert claimed hundreds of thousands of lives
during 1915-16. Excited Turkish gendarmes, one survivor recalled
witnessing, beheaded Armenian children for sport with their curved
swords.
Casualty estimates vary, but many scholars agree that at least
a million people died out of an Ottoman Armenian population of 2
million. It should not be overlooked that another religious minority
living in the Ottoman Empire, the Assyrians, were also targeted in
the same way, resulting in a similar demographic disaster.
Despite overwhelming evidence that these barbarities were centrally
planned and administered by the ultra-nationalist Young Turk
government (of which Gallipoli hero Ataturk was a leading figure),
modern Turkey vehemently denies that there was any such thing as the
Armenian genocide.
It is a considered treasonous – and punishable by law in some cases
– to admit that the genocidal events of WWI occurred. Scholars and
journalists who have spoken out, calling for truth and reconciliation,
have been subjected to official harassment and even imprisoned.
In the context of this pathological denialism, the propaganda value
of an event like Gallipoli to the Turkish establishment is immense.
Serious human rights violations still occur against minorities in
Turkey, whereas Gallipoli elevates the image of Turkey’s “good war”,
supposedly a war of pure defence. This narrative was in large part
designed by Ataturk to obliterate the memory of Turkey’s other,
far dirtier war against Armenian civilians.
Every Anzac Day, it can be seen how this Turkish Gallipoli mythology
dovetails with the Australian version of the Anzac myth. The two
mythologies bear a symbiotic relationship. In official speeches,
both governments laud each other’s character.
It could be argued that there is something attractive in the idea
that the descendents of past enemies can pay mutual tribute, but the
good will that exists between ordinary Turks and Australians should
not be used by the nationalist right in both countries to re-cast
and sanitise history.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/53885