Piers Akerman: Are we betraying those who fought and died for us?
The acronym ANZAC once symbolised a kinship with New Zealand — until Jacinda Ardern put her economic relationship with Communist China first, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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While we repeat Lest We Forget at today’s Anzac memorial services, many have already forgotten what our service men and women died for.
We remember their deaths, by the tens of thousands, but the reasons they sacrificed their lives are being wilfully ignored.
They died that we would be free.
Free to choose, free to live in a liberal democracy, free to exercise our will.
They could not have conceived that elected politicians would bow to the septic scum inhabiting Twitter and other anti-social media platforms.
They didn’t die to permit our taxes to be spent on a national broadcaster which reflects the views of a woke minority pushing fashionable causes.
It would never have entered their minds that governments would attack the freedom to speak out in informed discussion, or that Liberal federal governments would support racist laws that divide Australians into categories according to skin colour, or worse, with which particular racial minority or gender they choose to identify with.
We remember the dead but we turn our backs on the ideals for which they died.
After WWI, such was the repulsion at the mass slaughter brought about by the use of modern killing machinery, from poison gas, aeroplanes, machine guns, rapid fire cannon, submarines and tanks that the world’s leaders agreed to the formation of the League of Nations in 1920.
This utopian organisation was to be the forum in which international disputes would be heard and mediated bringing about the end of wars.
Not surprisingly it failed and it failed largely because of the hesitancy of Western nations to halt the rise of Hitler in Germany even though he had written and published his manifesto Mein Kampf by 1925, spelling out his blueprint for the conquest of Europe and the extermination of its Jewish people.
The League was called upon by numerous nations to settle border disputes but was largely ineffectual. The US, for one, never joined – not that it matters.
Japan invaded Mongolia in 1931, as the League’s observers watched helplessly.
Hitler took Germany out of the League in 1933 altogether and invaded neighbouring countries, Czechoslovakia and Poland, on the pretext of protecting people of German heritage.
Eventually, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, as Hitler’s forces crushed Poland and Australia was at war again.
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, brought the US into the war (though it had been raging in Europe for two years and the Chinese had been fighting the Japanese for nearly a decade.
Two months later, on February 19, 1942, the Japanese attacked Darwin bringing modern war to our nation for the first time in history as flights of Japanese aircraft dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on the city and harbour than had been dumped on Pearl Harbour.
On September 2, 1945, the Japanese signed the documents of surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbour, ending the war.
When on October 24, 1945, the United Nations was founded in San Francisco, Australia was one of the 50 nations present and the same grand vision for world peace as was sketched by the founders of the League of Nations 22 years earlier was rolled out – with equal success.
The UN has failed in almost all its goals and is now a parody of multinational co-operation.
Current members of the UN’s Human Rights Council include China (tell that to the tortured Uighurs being “re-educated” in concentration camps or the people in Hong Kong), Russia (the imprisoned opposition leader Andrei Navalny must feel comforted), and dictatorships like Venezuela.
World peace remains a distant dream of beauty contest entrants.
Russia is massing troops on the border with the Ukraine, China is building military and naval bases on islands and reefs southward to the Philippines and Indonesia even as its troops dig in along the Kashmir border with India.
It’s air force conducts ominous flyovers of the Taiwan Strait threatening to subsume the independent nation as it did Hong Kong, which it boasted enjoyed “one government, two
systems”.
With members of one of those systems now being imprisoned for believing the Chinese propaganda, the UN’s self-delusional sense of authority remains intact.
The very acronym, Anzac, symbolised a kinship with our New Zealand cousins that has been torn up by the current Kiwi Prime Minister, the Queen of Woke, Jacinda Ardern, who has put her economic relationship with Communist China before the defence agreements with Australia, the US, Britain and Canada.
Ironically, Japan, our ally in WWI, our enemy in WWII, looks like stepping up and replacing New Zealand as the more reliable and dependable partner.
Lest We Forget, New Zealand has forgotten, and unless we stand up for the goals of our dead, we, too, will show we have also forgotten.
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