Countless are the times politicians have spoken for the Australian military personnel whose names appear on the roll of honour at the Australian War Memorial because they were killed in service.

Remembrance Day, like Anzac Day on 25 April, is an opportunity for our political leaders to reaffirm, with bipartisan assurance, words to the effect that none of the 103,000 people named on that roll died in vain.

It’s nonsense of course.

The sad fact is the vast majority of them died in the imperial wars of others – most notably Britain and the United States – and Australia’s current decision-makers, those who get to send young men and women to their deaths, have learned too little from the experience.

Australia is astonishingly big on martial history for such a young nation whose technical foundation story (in our case federation at 1901) was not – like so many others – forged in cordite and cold steel. And yet our national identity has become increasingly militarised to the point where these two days of commemoration are imbued with a type of unquestionable sacred/religious grandeur (and marked with Christian prayer) notwithstanding that less than half of our population (including, presumably, military personnel) identify with that faith.

Go into any bookshop in an Australian airport and there it is: the wall of military machismo – shelf after shelf of........

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