This Anzac Day, beware politicians glossing over war’s evils to justify further military adventurism

‘On days like Anzac Day they’ll summon the “spirit” of the “fallen”, the “glorious dead” and their “sacrifice”, the living evoking war dead in a language imbued with ecclesiastics. Fitting, some might think, for the secular religion that Anzac has become.’ Photograph: Quinn Rooney/Getty Images

As Anzac Day arrives again with its hardy perennial of hyperbole about how a failed military operation on an obscure finger of the Ottoman Empire birthed the Australian nation, one soldier’s words particularly resonate.

They belong to Vietnam veteran Jim Robertson. Before the 2014 centenary of Anzac – a jamboree on which Australia spent at least $550m – he wrote to federal politicians about the tone he hoped the commemorations might take.