On Friday, New Zealand saluted our Gallipoli war dead who were butchered in their tens of thousands because of the incompetent British upper-class twits who led them.

As we know, the cream of our country's youth went off to join the other colonials of the British Empire to the killing fields in feudal Europe. I know it's unpatriotic and bad manners these days to mention, but many of these young volunteer soldiers were the same ones who, two years earlier, had saddled up their horses and rode into our cities to smash a general strike of workers.

Our then-conservative Government gave thousands of these young horsemen carte blanche to ride into town using hand-made batons to club workers into submission and smash the strike. After they won, these young farmers proudly nicknamed themselves "Massey's Cossacks" after our Prime Minister at the time.

The Russian Tsar was also using his Cossacks to put down his people, and we obviously wanted to emulate that practice. No doubt some of our boys would have been disappointed they weren't allowed to use guns and swords on the people like their Russian counterparts.

A little over a decade earlier Britain used thousands of armed volunteer forces from our farming communities as prison camp guards in South Africa. The Boers were fighting for independence. Our role was essentially restricted to burning down settlements, rounding up the women and children and locking them in concentration camps. The cunning plan was that if we wiped out all the towns and incarcerated the civilian population, the independence movement would collapse through lack of support. After many thousands of women and children died in these camps of starvation and disease, the resistance did, indeed, capitulate.

Today, we call these tactics ethnic cleansing and genocide but at the time it was seen as an enormously successful strategy. In fact, our local bourgeoisie were so proud of our role in suppressing the Boers they erected monuments in every New Zealand town. They are still there.

We don't want to be remembered for that sordid criminal affair on behalf of the British King and empire. But it makes it easier to understand why we went rushing off when the Great War was announced. So off our boys went to join the butchery in Europe. We were merged with the Aussies into the same Army corps as, I suppose, we all sounded the same to the English "toffs" who led us.

In those days, all colonial armies were led by white Englishmen. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) was on the same level as "coloured" troops, such as those from India. Enviably, we got the non-performing officers the British regiments didn't want.

The real story of Gallipoli was the shock realisation by our soldiers that our masters treated us as cannon fodder. The bravery of our soldiers couldn't hide this fact. We were supposed to take a few weeks to put "Little Johnny Turk" to flight and take control of his country. Unfortunately, we underestimated the bravery and courage of their farm boys.