The determination of the Council of the Australian War Memorial to enshrine Paul Keating as the spokesman for Australia’s commemoration of the Great War is a grave mistake, wrote Mervyn F Bendle in the first issue of Quadrant this year. As the official keynote speaker at the 2013 Remembrance Day ceremony, Paul Keating revealed that his understanding of the war and his view of the Anzac tradition are extremely superficial, partisan. H e largely regurgitated the nihilist view that the conflict was pointless and futile. The fact is, says Melvyn F. Bendle, the First World War was fought to defend the emerging liberal democracies from a massive onslaught of autocratic and authoritarian power that would have fundamentally redirected the trajectory of modern history if Germany had been victorious. He writes that the breathtaking extent of the territorial ambitions of the Second Reich did not become clear until the 1960s, when it was revealed by the exhaustive archival research and analysis initiated by one of the most important historians of the twentieth century. the German historian Fritz Fischer and pursued by many other scholars since. The results of his work should be known to anyone who, like Keating, is privileged to be provided with a public platform from which to propound their views about the Great War Even if it is to be rejected (and Fischer has his critics), his work revealed fundamental facts about that epochal conflict that must be addressed. Regrettably, there is no indication that Keating is even aware of Fischer’s discoveries; much less that he comprehends their meaning or their implications for Australia.... One of the key documents uncovered by Fischer is the now infamous “September Program”, which contains a list of war aims compiled by Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in September 1914. Read together with other documents from the period, a clear picture emerges of the future that the Second Reich intended to impose upon the world once a German victory had been achieved. At the core of this vision for a post-war Teutonic world was Mitteleuropa, a massively expanded Reich, five times the size of present-day Germany and encompassing all of Central and Eastern Europe.... Across the Channel, it was planned that Britain would forfeit its navy and also be crippled by massive indemnities. Above all, it would lose its empire, with India being accommodated within the Reich via railway networks stretching from Europe through the Middle East and Iran. As for Australia, our fledgling nation may well have been forfeited to the Reich’s sphere of influence as part of this new global imperium. From the German perspective we were seen as a strategic outpost of the white race, ripe for colonisation by a new Teutonic ruling class.... ...German warships visited Australian ports just before the war to carry out military and cultural reconnaissance, producing detailed reports on the activities of the German community, which was at the time the largest non-British ethnic group in Australia. Approving notice was taken of the significant presence of the German “spirit”, German imperial sentiment, and patriotism directed towards the Kaiser. Even if Australia had avoided such a fate, we would have been forced into negotiations with the Reich as a defeated, devastated and demoralised foe that could have expected no mercy from a newly victorious and hyper-aggressive superpower... an excellent destination for demobbed German troops looking for a new life as colonists and possessing vital access to German capital. The appropriation by German interests of both our agricultural and manufacturing industries would have left us economically subservient, while we would have been crippled as a trading nation by the loss of our most important markets and traditional sources of capital. The Reich would have controlled all the sea lanes upon which our access to the outside world depended. It would also have extended its control over German New Guinea to encompass the rest of New Guinea, and the Dutch and British colonial possessions in present-day Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and China. Germany would have dominated every aspect of our lives. quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/01-02/paul-keating-betrayed-anzacs/
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 06:40:53 +0000
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