Stirring the possum again
01 May 2017 Leave a comment
in defence economics, laws of war, politics - New Zealand, war and peace Tags: Anzac Day, World War I
#AnzacDay: why did we fight?
25 Apr 2017 3 Comments
in defence economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, war and peace Tags: Anzac Day, national security policy, World War I
Australia and New Zealand were filled with first and second generation migrants happy to rally to defend their mother country:
- 12 per cent of the population of New Zealand volunteered to fight; and
- 13 per cent of the male population of Australia volunteered to fight in World War 1.
The people and governments of New Zealand and Australia of that time were British to their boot straps. The Union Jack was in their flags for a reason.
Our specific quarrel with the Ottoman Empire was it joined Germany and others to be at war with the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
Removing the Ottoman Empire from that war would have strengthened Russia. A stronger Russia would have weakened Germany and its allies and brought the war to an earlier end.
The governments of Australian and New Zealand fell over themselves to declare war and pledge troops in 1914.
World War 1 started in the middle of an Australian election campaign in 1914.
In the September 1914 election, both opposition leader Andrew Fisher and Prime Minister Joseph Cook stressed Australia’s unflinching loyalty to Britain, and Australia’s readiness to take its place with the allied countries. Labor Party leader Fisher’s campaign pledge was to:
stand beside the mother country to help and defend her to the last man and the last shilling.
Labor defeated the incumbent government to win majorities in both houses. Billy Hughes and his nationalist party won the 1917 election in a landslide.
New Zealanders had even a better chance to reflect on the war-making choices of their leaders in 1914. Our election was in December of 1914. The passions of the moment had some chance to calm, and the fighting has started for real.
The will of the people at the December 1914 Parliamentary elections was a 90 per cent vote for the war parties. New Zealanders could have voted for the Labour MPs, several of whom were later imprisoned for their anti-conscription activities or for refusing military service.
In New Zealand, after that wartime election, the Prime Minister was an Irish Protestant who formed a coalition with an Irish Catholic as his deputy.
Do you know of a superior mechanism to elections for measuring the will of the people? Are elections inadequate to the task of deciding if the people support a war and that support of the public is based on well-founded reasons?
The reasons for New Zealand and Australia fighting are the just cause of fighting militarism and territorial conquest, empire solidarity, regional security interests such as the growing number of neighbouring German colonies, and long-term national security. A victorious Germany would have imposed a harsh peace.
New Zealand and Australian national security is premised on having a great and powerful friend. That was initially Britain. When the USA arrived in 1941 as a better great and powerful friend, the British were dropped like a stone.
AJP Taylor on England before World War I
25 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in economic history, war and peace Tags: AJ P Taylor, Anzac Day, World War I
The opening lines of “English History 1914-1945″ by A. J. P. Taylor
The demand and supply of war movies
25 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of natural disasters, movies, war and peace Tags: Anzac Day, Armistice Day, World War I, World War II
A Century of Movies About World War: reddit.com/r/dataisbeauti… #dataviz http://t.co/sGsb0d0s3J—
Randy Olson (@randal_olson) February 24, 2015
World War I casualty rates
25 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in war and peace Tags: Anzac Day, World War I
The origins of the Last Post
25 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in war and peace Tags: Anzac Day
In addition to its normal garrison use to signal the end of day when the duty officer returns from the tour of the camp and quarters, the Last Post call had another function at the close of a day of battle.
It signalled to those who were still out and wounded or separated that the fighting was done, and to follow the sound of the call to find safety and rest.
Its use in Remembrance Day and Anzac Day ceremonies in Commonwealth nations as an implied summoning of the spirits of the Fallen to the cenotaph. The UU military uses Taps the similar purposes.
![The people of the two nations [French and English] must be brought into mutual dependence by the supply of each other's wants. There is no other way of counteracting the antagonism of language and race. It is God's own method of producing an entente cordiale, and no other plan is worth a farthing. - Richard Cobden](https://i0.wp.com/izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-the-people-of-the-two-nations-french-and-english-must-be-brought-into-mutual-dependence-by-the-richard-cobden-370001.jpg)
What victory at Gallipoli could have stopped
25 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in laws of war, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, war and peace Tags: Anzac Day, Armenian genocide, Gallipoli campaign, Ottoman Empire, war crimes, World War I
On May 24, 1915, the Allied Powers jointly issued a statement explicitly charging for the first time ever another government of committing `a crime against humanity’.
Today is marked by Armenians worldwide as the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. vox.com/2015/4/22/8465… http://t.co/7pqqSowW3O—
Vox Maps (@VoxMaps) April 24, 2015
The Allied Governments announce publicly that they will hold personally responsible all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in the Armenian massacres.
Article 230 of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres required the defeated Ottoman Empire to
…hand over to the Allied Powers the persons whose surrender may be required by the latter as being responsible for the massacres committed during the continuance of the state of war on territory which formed part of the Ottoman Empire on August 1, 1914.
Ottoman military and high-ranking politicians were transferred to the Crown Colony of Malta on board of the SS Princess Ena and the SS HMS Benbow by the British forces, starting in 1919. These war criminals were eventually returned to Constantinople in 1921 in exchange for 22 British hostages held by the government in Ankara.
But for victory at Gallipoli, the Anzacs would have been the first Sergeant at Arms of a war crimes trial. By marching into Constantinople, the Anzacs may have been able to prevent the purging of the Ottoman archives of evidence of complicity of specific individuals.
#GallipoliFlashback: Real time sequence of events during the first day of the Anzac landing nzh.nu/M2jbf http://t.co/8Em54XZxtH—
(@nzherald) April 24, 2015
via 40 maps that explain World War I | vox.com and 1915 – Allies Condemn Turkish Genocide of Armenians – Joint declaration Condemning Turkish Genocide of Armenians as Crimes Against Humanity.
Elections as battlefields, literally: public choice aspects of the allocation of death in battle
25 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in Public Choice, war and peace Tags: Anzac Day, Civil War, Vietnam war
There have been studies of both elections affecting the fighting wars, and how troop deployments and furloughs are manipulated to affect elections. Regular Army and reservists from states and electorates that are hotly contested at the next election are kept away from the firing line.
Goff and Tollison (1987) studied how assignments to combat or non-combat positions wan influenced by political considerations during the Vietnam war. Casualties across U.S. states were a function of the political influence, especially in military affairs, of a state’s House and Senate delegations to Congress and the Senate.
Political influence on which troops were put into combat positions was not new as shown by Anderson and Tollison’s 1991 study of the electoral college is a battlefield during the American civil war. Their primary empirical finding was that electoral votes per capita are a strong explainer of casualties across Union states, all else equal. Lincoln would dispatch and withdraw troops from the frontline on the basis of electoral considerations, including who was needed back home to vote in the 1864 presidential election:
Northern causalities [during the Civil War] were partly determined by electoral votes in 1864… Given that the Northern troops were organized by states and that President Lincoln sought to be re-elected, . . . [t]roops from close states were much less likely to suffer causalities . . . [based on the logic that] . . . dead men cannot vote
Fractions of the population that died in World War II
25 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in war and peace Tags: Anzac Day, World War I
Shocking! –> The fraction of various country’s population that died in #WWII. #dataviz http://t.co/SlNtvEj8BT—
Randy Olson (@randal_olson) March 28, 2015
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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