I can't recall who said it, but something along the lines of democracy not only being a society expressed by each citizen, but also a compact with the past and a promise for the future.
It's important to remember the past and the actors who made it so. My own Uncle served in Tobruk and then deployed to PNG and he suffered emotionally for the rest of his life from the horrors coz of it. A kind of braveand duty that is foreign to many of us born after the war I suspect.
