KEY POINTS:
Perhaps we should give Henry Ford an overdue pat on his capitalist back. Not only did he do much more for the working class than ever Marx and Lenin could manage, it's also tempting to suggest he told us everything we need to know about the past -
"History is bunk".
But, in that instance, Henry went a tad too far. "Bunk" is unduly harsh. And dismissive. One casual wave of the tongue renders the past a wasteland, a place not worth the visit.
And that's wrong. Even if we can't go there. Not truly. Not in a way that lets us experience it as it was when the future was just a sunset away and yesterday was all we knew.
Because the future's come and gone many times since then and we know so much more now. We will never viscerally understand the terror of the plague in medieval Europe because the mindset of the time is a mystery to us.
And we will never truly appreciate what it meant to be at Gallipoli. Our modern distaste of empire and militarism denies us that privilege. We cannot share the vision of Colonel William Malone who proudly repeated in his diary a description of New Zealand soldiers fighting like "white Ghurkas".
There'll be no one of influence saying that today. Those good folk - including some who think it's "a damned good idea" to emulate the father of modern politics, Joseph Goebbels, and manipulate whatever self-serving propaganda they can - have other uses for history.
In the age of the "peacekeeper" there's no room for Ghurkas. And hasn't been for some time.
There are old soldiers in New Zealand who still insist there's one of their own whose courage in Vietnam merited a recommendation from the Army that he be awarded the Victoria Cross.
But the politicians said "No". His bravery served an unpopular cause and recognising it was inconvenient.
Which brings us back to Mr Ford's axiom. It was true to this extent; history may not be "bunk" but it is an invention - and often a fiction.
The past is always a prisoner of the present, a hostage of our desire to make it what we wish it to be.
Inasmuch as it serves our myths, we hold it to ransom. It's our creation as much as our creator.
You will hear this in the speeches today. You will hear us recast the past to fit new agendas.
War is a futility, Gallipoli a disaster and Passchendaele a massacre, each rescued only by the stoicism and courage of the individual soldier.
We see World War I as capitalism in uniform, a ghastly monument to the establishment's callous indifference and manifest incompetence.
All captured in a phrase, supposedly uttered by a German Commander, and repeated by a 60s historian; "The British fight like lions, but they are lions led by donkeys."
As pithy as Henry's axiom, it's the seed of our modern sensibility.
No matter that the quote is fictitious, an invention of the author's.
It's taken root in our consciousness and vindicated our conviction that war is invariably dreadful and futile.
Of this we are certain.
But we speak so confidently of the futility of war only because we lack the insight - or courage - to admit it isn't true.
War is not always futile. World War I may have been an awful collision of alliances - a mad entanglement of pacts played out in Flanders fields - but not World War II.
Only the merest and maddest handful would deny it was good to defeat Adolf Hitler. Grave as our shortcomings are, they can't match those of the 1000-year Reich - in which much of the world would be subordinated had the Nazis prevailed.
The truly awful thing about war isn't its futility but its necessity.
Not in every instance or for every cause but at certain times in certain places - including this country.
Truth to tell, every European New Zealander who speaks of war's futility has forgotten it was 19th-century conflicts which secured them their place in this land when the precepts of the Treaty had been cast aside.
Few people in New Zealand today will acknowledge that fact, let alone express gratitude for it but unless our lives are completely bereft of meaning we should remember it.
And pause for a moment before repeating the mantra of futility.
And you don't have to be a warmonger to know this of the future. It will repeat the past.
A Frenchman - who didn't build cars - captured that in the phrase (translated), "The more things change the more they stay the same".
We've just signed a Free Trade Agreement with a country perfectly willing to ship boatloads of arms to Robert Mugabe. There's a contradiction there that may grow so large we cannot ignore it.
The most honest tribute we could pay the soldiers of the past - though we moderns categorically refuse to do so - is to accept, with no pleasure, that we may one day need to do what they did and remedy something so awful that only the futility of war will suffice.
