NSW’s Anzac Day retail ban is the latest in a long line of pious and empty symbolic gestures | Paul Daley

Iconoclastic views on the holy acronym are too often condemned as disrespectful to the war dead

I’ve thought and written a lot, including books, magazine articles and plenty of pieces here, about how Australia commemorates its soldiers of the first world war who are referenced as the most revered acronym in national conversation – Anzacs.

Truth, the old adage goes, is the “first casualty of war”. It might just be a primary fatality of its commemoration, too.

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