on ANZAC Day, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Soldiers
source: Australian War Memorial I used to be a pacificist. It was so simple - War is Wrong, any violence is wrong, anyone choosing to participate in it is wrong, and that's that. I knew how right I was with all the confidence and ignorance of a member of a generation that has never known war. I grew up in Australia in the 1980's, where there was no war. The blackfellas had long been defeated and their history revised. War was something from history books, something that other, less intelligent countries still did, something you could see on the news, but it was never a part of my life. I was 13 when Australia went to the Gulf War, but I didn't know anyone who was involved, and couldn't see what it had to do with us at all. And because my priveleged, peaceful, Western society was all that I knew, I thought it was normal. I had an image of the history of the world as being mostly peaceful, interrupted by bouts of terror and violence occasionally. I didn't see h...