Anzac Day honours those who fell or were war-crippled away from these shores; Māori, Pākehā, people of different tribes, ethnicities, religions; people like each or us and all of us who call this land home went and faced mortal danger.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the war situation, and regardless of whether they fully understood the reasons, they went together and paid the price under the one flag of nationhood.
Too many were buried under that, far from family or homeland. Yes, we had our own earlier conflicts here, inter-tribal, and inter-ethnic, worthy of acknowledgement certainly, but these were more about the disunity of civil war than the unity of Anzac commemorations.
When Robin Fabish challenged the use of McLean and Whitmore names locally, men after whom Napier parks have been named, and men who were associated with the Battle of Omarunui in 1866 on the grounds they caused 'significant suffering for Māori', his so-called 'careful choice of words' failed him as completely as did his sense of historical accuracy or fairness.
The 1866 attack on Hauhau Māori when they had arrived in the area and displaced Ngati Kahungunu Māori at Omarunui occurred when the suspicion that they were preparing to attack Napier was not answered by Hauhau prophet Panapa when the question was put to him by Donald McLean.
Two hundred militiamen led by Colonel Whitmore were joined by an equal number of Kahungunu warriors to deal with this potential Hauhau threat in a short but decisive attack at Omarunui.
Robin Fabish's presentation was in my view inappropriate for the occasion, unbalanced and unfair.
The 1800s were very damaging for the tribal Māori world, both economically and culturally, but the first half of the century was particularly brutal, with the marriage of cultural customs of utu, meaning reciprocation, and the musket.
The resultant grievance-settling intertribal warfare is estimated to have killed somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000 Māori with old grievances leading to new, and prisoners being enslaved, killed and eaten, and even smoked human heads becoming tradeables for the purchase of ever more muskets.
Massacres and battles were numerous, and the number who died is estimated to exceed the number of dead in either World War I or II.
The Battle of Matakitaki in 1822 has been estimated to have cost 2000 Māori lives, almost as many who died in all of the later New Zealand Wars.
The horrors and insecurities of the Musket Wars were borne by Māori people themselves, and their desire for peace was a pathway that led to the Treaty of Waitangi itself in 1840, with its hope that the rule of law would replace the rule of violence.
The second half of the century saw the rise of the New Zealand Wars, where Māori rose up against land confiscations and what they saw as other Treaty breaches, and the rights and wrongs of this post-1840 period are the subject of legal, and other actions today.
It is important to acknowledge the place of the New Zealand Land Wars in our national history, but it is also important to acknowledge the earlier Musket Wars and their devastating effect on Māori tribal society.
Truth and honesty are interlinked. In the United States these bonds are being shattered by people who believe that lies repeated often enough become truth; the election was stolen, the assault on the Capitol was a patriotic protest.
With the disease of shameless misrepresentation taking root with millions there, the constitution and democracy itself are being challenged. Nor is our multi-ethnic society immune from these processes.
Alan Rhodes is a former secondary teacher, educational adviser to the Cook Islands, and a lecturer in sociology.
