Anzac Day is a timely date to post this speech by former Australian prime minister PJ Keating launching a book on Churchill and his relationship with Australia..
The book is written by Graham Freudenberg former master speech writer for Gough Whitlam and occasionally Keating too.
As you’d expect from Keating it is a thorough and thoughtful speech. Seems like he actually read the book.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/paul-keatings-speech-20081031-5f1h.html
Thanks JW – I watched the service from Gallipoli yesterday and noted that both Tony Abbott and John Key used the occasion to justify recent and future campaigns. They are so far up each other’s alimentary canals, that they have no shame in grandstanding and putting their military plans in the same frame of reference.
Gallipoli is universally accepted as a tragic waste of life. Churchill’s decision must have weighed heavily on him as the carnage unfolded. His subsequent affection for Australia and New Zealand is understandable in that context.
While I am a pacifist, I also respect and honor the dead of Gallipoli because they were put in an impossible position. While wars will of course happen again, something like that must never happen again. Other than a vague notion of “king and country”, the ANZACs were there not to defend their own lands, but because they were ordered to. When people are reminded of the campaign and commemorate it – it is not to rubber stamp any old campaign that the government of the day cooks up. We are commemorating that event – the one that shows the futility of war.
Key and Abbott seem to be saying – “Lest we forget et cetera we must never let this happen again yada yada – but we are going to do it again, oh yeah…”
If there’s one thing the current crop of political leaders can be trusted on, it is that they have no understanding of history whatsoever.
Look at the UK – Miliband, Cameron and Clegg haven’t a fucking clue about anything that happened prior to Black Wednesday. The modern condition seems to be a debilitating parochialism – both geographic and historical.
Thanks for that Junior. If I was a reader I’d read the book.
A couple of footnotes – not only is 2015 the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli, and thank God Anzac Day is over, but it’s also the 50th anniversary of the start of Australia and New Zealand’s involvement in Vietnam, another great military disaster where the Antipodean countries meekly followed their Northern Hemisphere puppetmeisters into a futile and tragic mess.
2015 is also the 50th anniversary of the death of Churchill. In that year a public appeal was made to establish the Churchill Trust and to this day it holds the record for the most amount of money raised for a charity in a single day. I was a beneficiary of the Churchill Trust some 10 years ago, traveling to the U.S. and Italy to research Nino Rota’s Fellini scores.
Well said BC
Further to BC’s excellent comment, this article from the Saturday paper adds a bit of perspective: while the dead of Gallipoli are quite rightly honoured, the damaged of Australia’s more recent adventures are ignored. http://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/defence/2015/04/25/the-other-face-anzac-day/14298840001798
So many times people say that men came back from 20th century wars with mental disorders and that this wasn’t understood back then. This is true and I am certain that this has affected subsequent generations. Yet the very high proportion of ex-servicemen on the streets today suggests that we still don’t get it, even though we are apparently living in more enlightened times.