Under Attack

ANZAC DAY 2022

Today the 25th of April 2022 in Australia and New Zealand and in many other countries around the world it is with deep respect and reverence, and with an immense sense of gratitude that we remember and honour, on ANZAC Day, those of our military who lost their lives in the conflicts and wars that Australia and New Zealand have been involved in.

It is important to remember too that Anzac Day should not and does not give honour and glory to either war, or to conflict, rather, it recognises and remembers those that died in them. We should also remember that those who died, did so irrespective of whether they volunteered to fight or were conscripted to fight.

Also important is to recognise and remember that many civilians lost their lives in these conflicts too, most times simply as a consequence of being in the own place at the wrong time. In many locations around the world the loss of civilian life continues today, for example, in the Ukraine and in Syria.

It is a deeply sobering thought to recognise that we humans have killed more than 160 million of our fellow human beings in various conflicts and wars around the world since the beginning of the 20th Century, from 1900 to 2021.

Although wars in the past have started for complex reasons, often distilled down to power, those that fought and died in those wars having done so from a sense of patriotism or through obligation or seeking excitement, it is still true that they went or were sent on our behalf, by our governments that we democratically elected. Living in a democracy we are represented by our elected government who ask our military to fight on our behalf.

I say on our behalf because irrespective of whether you agree or disagree with our military being tasked to fight against an invader in our own country or to fight in a foreign land for some cause or another, in a democracy it is still we, the people, that elect the government that acts on our behalf.

Although none of us choose which country or political regime we are born into I believe we are fortunate to have been born into a democratic country, even with all the flaws that exist in any form of true democracy.

In such a democracy we are fortunate enough to have the freedom and the right to immediately protest against a decision by our government and to direct our vote accordingly at the next election.?

We even have the right and the freedom regarding our disagreement, to move to another democratic country, or even, nonsensically, to a non-democratic one. Those born into other than a democratic country have no such meaningful actual freedoms or rights.?

Having been activated into a war or conflict area means that under almost all circumstances they are expected to obey orders even unto death.

In 1854 Alfred Lord Tennyson, the great English poet wrote his famous poem ‘the charge of the light brigade’ about the Battle of Balaclava, he wrote….

??????Forward the light Brigade!?- Was there a man dismayed?

?????????????????Not tho the soldier knew??- Someone had blundered:

?????????????????Theirs not to make reply????- Theirs not to reason why

????????????????Theirs but to do and die?????- Into the valley of death rode the six hundred’.????

Sixty-One years after that charge, on the 25th April 1915, Australian and NZ troops landed on the shores of Gallipoli in an attempt to secure the shipping lanes of the Dardanelles.?

And after some 8 months of hard, dirty, and often times brutal hand to hand combat, and under appalling conditions, the NZ and Australian troops were finally withdrawn from Gallipoli.?

That secret but successful evacuation of the troops after such a disastrous campaign is an epic story in itself.?

The story of their fighting together, Aussies and Kiwis (the diggers) and the comradery that grew between them has created an enduring part of both country’s national identity, The Australian and New Zealand Army Corp – the ANZACs.

Australians and New Zealanders have since then died fighting together in a further 28 conflicts or wars around the world, with the blood of our young people having seeped into the lands and into the sands of the rivers, seas and oceans of many countries around the world.?

Yet, as Mustafa Kemal the Turkish front-line Commander who fought us (ANZACs) so well at Gallipoli, and who would later come to be known as the ‘Atta-Turk’ said best, and had engraved on a large stone monument at Gallipoli

“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives.

You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country.

Therefore, rest in peace.

There is no difference between the johnnies

And the Mehmet’s to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours.

You, the mothers, Who sent your sons from far away countries

Wipe away your tears, Your sons are now lying in our bosom, And are in peace.

After having lost their lives, on this land,? they have become our sons as well”

I want to come now and finish with a reflection on the last part of Lt Colonel, John McCrae’s poem from the first World War,

In Flanders fields.

We are the dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields

Take up our quarrel with the foe

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch, be yours to hold it high

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep,

though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

Today, with respect reverence and remembrance, we pause together as two nations (Australia and New Zealand) to do two important things, first, to keep faith with and honour the dead, and second to remind ourselves that we are asked to ‘Take up our quarrel with the foe’. Today it is Apathy.

Today, the enemy, the foe that we fight may not be so overt or so openly observable or so clearly aggressive as it is when in open conflict, but nevertheless it is no less insidious or evil in its outcome, and it is apathy.

Apathy towards the continued existence of democracies around the world and apathy for the freedoms we have as a result of them, and for the high price paid for them. The lost lives and the lost potential of fellow human beings to care for and contribute to family, friends, community and country given freely to ensure the continued existence of such a fledgling and tenuous attempt at providing a better way of life for those that adhere to the democratic way of life and too the international rules-based order that has ensued because of such a system of governance.

Freedoms are all too easily taken for granted when you have them, but freedoms in and of themselves are not rights, not unless the responsibility that goes with them is recognised and protected when needed. If we don’t learn from our past we may well, yet again, be doomed to repeat it.

Based on the ancient Greek idea of democracy as a form of governance, this new democratic concept has gained ground since the 17th Century and moved us into the 21st century creating in particular, since the second world war, the longest era of general peace through a ‘rules-based order’ system with the most significant number of countries around the world being governed by one form of democracy or another. This rules-based order and form of democratic government is now under threat like no other time since the second world war.

These are some of the milestones that have contributed to that Rules Based Order and through the coalition of democratic countries that have combined both the civil and governmental democracies to give us that peace. If apathy today has its way, these achievements are now under threat,

1689 – The English ‘Bill of Rights’

1776 – the American ‘Declaration of Independence’

1789 – The French Declaration ‘The Rights of Man’

1893 –Universal suffrage, ‘The women’s vote’ (NZ first followed by

??????????other democracies).

1918 – many countries adopt a more democratic form governance, but

???????????still with many monarchies.

1930 - ?A decade of dictators in Europe and Latin America

1945 – onwards, many countries becoming democratic including Israel in

1948 – and India in 1950.

1945 – establishment of United Nations (51 countries. Today, even though

???????????in need of reform, particularly the security council, there are

??????????193 countries)

?1948 ?- Declaration of Universal Human Rights.

President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address can, I believe, be paraphrased into an international context.

‘Since the second world war many have died before us defending the right of free nations to be independent and free from invasion and that all men are created equal.

We are now engaged in a great ideological war, testing whether that idea of democracy and the rules-based order, and of a nation’s sovereignty so conceived and so dedicated in blood, can long endure. Today we are met on the battlefield in the Ukraine to test this idea of the continuance of peace through democracy and sovereignty, against the right of another nation to enter, without permission, into such sovereign borders, attack, kill and maim within those borders, in order to impose a different will.

On this ANZAC day it can be recognised that it is those people, the defenders of that sovereign nation of Ukraine, that through their blood treasure and sacrifice, who have so consecrated their own land and the idea of democracy and sovereignty, that it is far above our poor power to add or detract. ?

Even though that country has had, and continues to have assistance from other countries, other democracies from around the world, it is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated now to the ongoing work which they who fight there, and have already died there, have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this idea of democracy and sovereignty, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth'.

If the ANZACs have fought and died since the Gallipoli landing in 1915 for universal human rights, democracy and sovereignty, it seems the fight is on again, in reality, in the Ukraine and in other countries and, at least for the moment, ideologically on an international scale.

To repeat the last lines in ‘Flanders Fields’, "to you from failing hands we throw the torch, be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.