HT: https://twitter.com/HistoryInPixx/status/557142114384236544?s=09
The Gallipoli campaign: the Allies invade Turkey
25 Apr 2015 Leave a comment
in politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, war and peace Tags: Anzac Day, Gallipoli campaign, World War I
Anzac Day: why did we fight at Gallipoli?
25 Apr 2014 1 Comment
in war and peace Tags: Anzac Day, Gallipoli, national security, world war 1
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 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.
Anzac Day: Gallipoli as a strategic and then a humanitarian intervention
25 Apr 2014 Leave a comment
in war and peace Tags: Anzac Day, Armenian genocide, crimes against humanity, Gallipoli
A victory at Gallipoli would have:
• brought World War 1 to an earlier conclusion; and
• Allowed for earlier arrests of the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide that started 99 years and one day ago.
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’.
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.
Hundreds of eyewitnesses, including the neutral United States and the Ottoman Empire’s own allies recorded and documented numerous acts of state-sponsored massacres of Armenians. The United States had several consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire until it joined the Allies in 1917. There were also numerous missionary compounds established in Armenian-populated regions.
Many foreign officials offered to intervene on behalf of the Armenians, including the Pope.
The Wiki entry on the contemporary reporting of the genocide is instructive with a scan of a 16 July 1915 U.S. diplomatic cable on this campaign of race extermination.
Australian and New Zealand participation in the invasion of the Ottoman Empire as a by-product set the legal and moral infrastructure for the Nuremberg trials: governments would hold others to account for crimes against humanity and genocide.
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
Various Ottoman politicians, generals, and intellectuals were transferred to Malta where they were held for some three years while searches were made of archives in Constantinople, London, Paris and Washington to investigate the Armenian genocide.
The Inter-Allied tribunal never solidified and the detainees were eventually returned to Turkey in exchange for British citizens held hostage by Kemalist Turkey.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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