11.11.11

[crisis]

“After the Last Post and The Ode, and the minute’s silence for the lives lost, Mr Keating stood in the forecourt of the memorial and damned World War I as lacking any virtue.

With near freezing rain falling upon the gathering of about 500 at the ceremony, Mr Keating tossed aside his overcoat and declared the war was the result of a ‘‘quagmire of European tribalism’’.

In his view of the history, Mr Keating said that by 1915, when Australian troops went into battle, Australia had no need to reaffirm its European heritage at the price of being dragged into a European holocaust.

He denied that Australia was ever in need of any ‘‘redemption’’ at Gallipoli, any more than it was in need of one at Kokoda 30 years later. ‘‘There was nothing missing in our young nation or our idea of it that required the martial baptism of a European cataclysm to legitimise us.’’

“By the outbreak of World War I, Australians, through federation, were already moving to new ideas of themselves as part of a new world: notions of equality and fairness, suffrage for women, a universal living wage, support in old age and a sense of inclusive patriotism; an Australian literature and poetry. They had even developed a celebratory style of architecture and named it ‘‘Federation’’, Mr Keating said.

But a war was about to end the old world, one that ‘‘not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century,’’ he said.

“Australia, Mr Keating said, had already escaped the ‘‘dismal legacy of Europe’s ethnic stigmatisation and social stratification’’.

‘‘But out of loyalty to imperial Britain, we returned to Europe’s killing fields to decide the status of Germany, a question which should earlier have been settled by foresight and statecraft.’’

Nevertheless, he said, the bloody battles of Flanders, the Western Front and Gallipoli had distinguished Australians, ‘‘demonstrating what we were made of’’.

‘‘Our embrace of a new sense of human values and relationships through these events gave substance to what is now the Anzac tradition,’’ he said.

And within the Hall of Memory, Mr Keating’s words of two decades ago lay chiselled in stone.”

 

Also worth remembering.

[colinm1]

the war to end all wars, they said,

and most of us , remember ,through books or family ,the horrors of war

but the powers to be, seem to have short memories,

thus ww2, Korean war , Vietnam , the list is long !!

all after the " war to end all wars"

 

[Guest]

War is politics by another means - as long as there are politics, there will be wars. The nature of warfare ensures the war continues for many of the surviving combatants long after the battle sphere they were sent to has been left.

[crisis]

7 hours ago, colinm1 said:

the war to end all wars, they said,

and most of us , remember ,through books or family ,the horrors of war

but the powers to be, seem to have short memories,

thus ww2, Korean war , Vietnam , the list is long !!

all after the " war to end all wars"

 

We witnessed an event in Melbourne on Friday that  a disturbing amount of people put down to a religion they don't like. 94 years after WW1 started, and was supposed to end all wars, we invaded two countries in the Middle East. And precipitated a conflict with a force we can never defeat to ensure war and suffering will never end.