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Title: For Peace Author: Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group Date: 25 April 2016 Language: en Topics: Australia, World War I, anti-militarism Source: Retrieved on 12th October 2021 from http://anarkismo.net/article/29248
On 25 April 1915, Australian, New Zealand and other troops of the
British Empire landed at a Turkish beach at Gallipoli. It was a fiasco,
a disastrous side-venture in World War I. Bloodied and beaten, they
withdrew in January the next year. The British High Command weren’t done
with them, though, and sent the Anzacs to the Western Front, where some
of the main business of WWI was being conducted. There, even more Anzac
blood was shed for the cause of one grasping imperialist alliance in its
struggle against another that was no better. The blood continued to flow
until November 1918.
The War ended in 1918, not because of the military victories of the
Entente on the Western Front, but because revolution had broken out in
Germany and the Kaiser had abdicated. Revolution had also swept Russia
the year before and it dawned on the ruling classes of Europe that they
were also in danger if the War was not brought to a halt. And so it was,
with the Armistice being signed only two days after the abdication. The
Austro-Hungarian empire had disintegrated, with declarations of
independence in Prague, Budapest and Zagreb. And even the collapse of
the Ottoman Empire owed as much to the rebellions in its Arab provinces
(encouraged by one Colonel T. E. Lawrence) as to the exploits of British
and Australian troops in Palestine. The War ended because many of the
people involved refused to fight it.
These days, Anzac Day is an occasion for the most appalling propaganda
for nationalism and militarism. The Anzacs are subject, metaphorically,
to a secular canonisation and their hagiographies are the theme of
endless documentaries and coffee table books. The purpose of this has
nothing to do with their sacrifice and everything to do with drumming up
support for today’s imperialist wars and making criticism of Australia’s
imperialist military taboo. Governments only spend hundreds of millions
on the dead if they think it will help them turn a profit on the living.
If we want peace, we must follow the example of the workers and
worker-soldiers who ended WWI. We must build a working class movement
which spans across frontiers and cuts the ground out from under the
capitalist governments that have no solution for international problems
but war. We must make a workers’ revolution and overthrow capitalism.
And only then will we be able to build a world of liberty, equality and
solidarity – a world at peace.
END WAR
AND MILITARISM