Remembrance Day: The long legacy of freedom
Ninety-six years ago today the guns fell silent on the bloody Western Front in France and Belgium. World War I had ended. The conflict had exacted an enormous toll, with the Australian Imperial Force's casualty rate of 64 per cent being proportionately the highest in the conflict. Officially, there were 61,000 killed in action, and 158,000 wounded, maimed or gassed. Many thousands were psychologically damaged. After the war, hundreds committed suicide.
A pall of grief hung over the nation. The bewilderment of loss pervaded alike the neat suburban homes of the cities and the humblest abodes in the smallest rural hamlets.
The scale of the carnage has haunted generations. It led some to adopt what Anzac historian Mervyn Bendle has condemned as a "nihilist" evaluation of the conflict. That is, the losses were to no good end, the carnage having no moral justification. The 1914-18 generation was mere unthinking fodder for the cannons. The legend of the Anzacs and the AIF is reduced to a hollow tale, an irredeemable tragedy.
Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. For Australia much was at stake - politically, economically, strategically - if German militarism had prevailed in Europe. Germany's war aims were radically expansionist in scope, as Professor Fritz Fischer's Grab For World Power (1961) - a pioneering research into the causes of WWI - has established.
Germany's so-called September Program - its war aims as reflected in elite economic and military opinion - involved the subjugation of all of Europe and the establishment of a massive empire across sub-Saharan Africa.
Beyond, the British Empire would have been dismantled and the Royal Navy scuttled, leaving Germany a world military behemoth and an imperial colossus.
Dr Bendle sums up the strategic scenario for Australia to our north as follows: "We would have had to deal with a victorious and hyper-aggressive superpower, whose autocratic ruling caste dominated Europe and controlled all sea lanes upon which our existence as a trading nation depended.
"Moreover, Germany already controlled German New Guinea, the Bismark Archipelago, Nauru, Palau, German Samoa, the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands, and the Mariana Islands, and these would have been the bases for further German imperial expansion . . . involving the rest of New Guinea, and the Dutch and British colonial possessions in present-day Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore."
What Dr Bendle means by Germany as a "hyper-aggressive superpower" can be gauged from the work of Professor Isabell Hull. In her 2005 volume Absolute Destruction: Military Power and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany - "a study of institutional extremism" - she describes German military culture, 1870-1918, in this way:
"In engagements large and small, in Europe and in the colonies, the imperial German military repeatedly resorted to terrific violence and destruction in excess of Germany's own security requirements or political goals . . . even contrary to ultimate military effectiveness. Routine German military operations developed a dynamic of extremism that could, and did, lead to the extermination of civilian populations in the colonies and that characterised German practices in occupied Europe in World War I." Hull also suggests Adolf Hitler and national socialism inherited and expressed much of that culture a generation later.
More broadly, during the 19th century there had evolved the so-called Germanic Ideology. It was a toxic mix of ideas suffusing many levels of German society. It involved a millenarian vision of a racially pure global empire.
This pathology was articulated by the educated elites as well as by the occult utopian and anti-Semitic cults that pervaded Wilhelmine Germany. Modern German historian George Mosse, in his The Crisis of German Ideology (1964), pointed to the "dreadful implications for the world if Germany possessed by that ideology had prevailed in the war".
Germany was also implicated in the ethnic cleansing of Turkey that had started, even as the Anzacs landed on April 25, 1915. The Armenian genocide at Turkish hands began on April 24. Ultimately, 1.2 million Armenians were exterminated. A 2500-year-old Christian civilisation ceased to exist. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks were also murderously "cleansed" from the Gallipoli Peninsula, and beyond.
That the Anzacs, at enormous cost, contributed to the defeat of Germany and its allies is surely something to honour. Within the context of the British Empire, the all-volunteer AIF stood in defence of an open, liberal- democratic society, with all the possibilities for ongoing social reform and human advancement it offered - and which, a century on, we continue to enjoy.
Lest we forget *.
