The Voice of God
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
We cannot honour them in that, cannot name our enemy, because in Gallipoli, we were the Japanese. We have in our history, in our recent memory, in Kokoda and its wider circles, a struggle both epic and of historical moment and with the balance of good on our side.
Yet it goes untouched, passed over for the next round of Gallipokitsch. We are so desperate not to have a real confrontation with the deep racist and imperialist roots of our purported founding national event, that we will let the real sacrifices for our national life go unrecognised.
- Guy Rundle, Crikey, Apr 27, 2015
On the 11th November, 90 years ago, over 300,000 people attended the opening of the Shrine of Remembrance here in Melbourne. At the time, Melbourne's population was 1 million people.
War commemoration often walks a fine line. Nationalism, colonialism, the glorification or war and the gas lighting of history can all be wrapped up in it. But it was only after the First World War that western nations started to remember the massacred soldiers. For the first time, they weren't just the fodder of monarchs, they were people, usually working people, who were fed into the meat grinder of war.
John Quiggan has some reflections on Armistice day and does a good job of tying it back to the world's current conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine.
Finally, the Guardian has a great read on the 70 Australians that went to Spain to fight Franco's Fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is one of my favourite books and it's a conflict that I've been fascinated by for a very long time. Orwell, as well as Hemingway, also travelled to Spain to join the International Brigades along with those Australians. Fighting Fascism is front of mind with the election of Trump.