War Com-memorations and Remembrance Day “Celebrations”
NOVANEWS
By Dr. Binoy Kampmark
The officials are called one by one to lay wreathes, a ceremony of mechanical efficiency. With each laying comes the sense of wonder at how this could happen. Political figures are the first to vote in parliaments and side with the executive when it comes to wars. The temptations of human drives to tempt, and then succumb to death, were there long before Sigmund Freud identified them.
In the Australian capital, there were many wreaths, so many uniformed, deodorised dignitaries distant from the cries of battle and the horror of engineered slaughter. There were the expected, the usual, the normal: the most medalled of them all, the Governor General, the various Chiefs of Army, Navy and Air Force.
There was the Chief Justice of the Australian High Cou...