As we see the stars align one can’t help but wonder if the same sentiments, events, and alignments now coalescing are not strangely reminiscent of the 1930s… Particularly, with the much-publicised rise in anti-Jewish fervour which seems to be evident all over the world and to our great shame here in Australia. Commentators are variously comparing the current rise in ‘antisemitism’ to the events of Germany in 1938. Personally, I don’t like the use of the word ‘antisemitism’ as I think it’s a special word degraded by common coinage and prefer the use of the term Jew-hatred, because that is exactly what it is. But I digress.
Variously attributed to Edmund Burke, more recently Winston Churchill, and more accurately George Santayana is the proposition that ‘those who fail to learn from history are destined to repeat it’ which presents a frightening proposition when we overlay the current situation with that existing in the later 1930s. That resulted in the greatest conflagration in world history with an estimated 70-85 million people dying, up to three quarters of which number were non-military, suffering in deliberate genocide, mass bombings, disease, and starvation.
Maybe a brief overview of the first few years of second world war is appropriate? Of course, we were ill-prepared for that one, but we threw in with the British and sent troops to North Africa and airmen to England. Notwithstanding the sacrifice of 60,000 of our soldiers 25 years earlier, the prime of Australian manhood lost in the defence of England and France, off they went again, acquitting themselves admirably and instrumentally inflicting the initial defeat of Rommel’s Africa Corps.
Setting that aside as the background, Australia was under serious threat from the Japanese. Darwin and Broome had been bombed, and landings had been made on the north of New Guinea. Faced with what in all probability indicated an imminent invasion of the homeland, the then Prime Minister, John Curtin, decided to bring Australian troops back for the defence of the homeland. A decision that didn’t please the British who attempted to hijack the transport ships in order to protect the ‘jewel in the British Crown’, India. Providentially news of this deployment reached Australia and Curtin ordered the troop ships to continue homeward, thus saving them from being overrun by the Japanese on making landfall in Burma. It was at this point that Curtin said, we no longer look to Britain but henceforth we look to America. And so, our association with the US was cemented and has continued until now.
In avoidance of being sucked into discussion of what in retrospect seem questionable even immoral wars, the form of the Japanese advance after the fall of Singapore into the Dutch South-East Indies, New Guinea, and the islands as far as the Solomons serves as another ominous warning. This was brought home in a recent Four Corners program wherein the commercial interests of modern China were highlighted mimicking almost exactly the Japanese advance of the early 40s.
What the Japanese did with force, the CCP has achieved with their version of ‘unrestricted warfare’ and debt entrapment.
More ominous is a reflection that the first major naval battle after the attack on Pearl Harbour was that fought in the Coral Sea. The first over the horizon navel battle fought between opposing Fleet Air Arms. Notwithstanding the outcome of Coral Sea, one is again forced to consider that had not the foreshadowed invasion of Port Moresby been abandoned, Eastern Australia would have been cut off from shipping and resupply and our coastal cities vulnerable to attack from the Tasman Sea. Now that sounds familiar!
The gradual isolation of Australia should send chills down the spine of any indigenous student of history. To our immediate north, Indonesia flirts with Vladimir Putin, while China’s CCP continues its financial entrapment of our Pacific Island neighbours and militarily and quite literally, firing an intimidatory warning shot across the bows of our ship of state. The symbolism of which could hardly be ignored. All this whilst our current leadership is so caught up in its ideological abhorrence of Donald Trump that they would prefer to throw in with European powers as part of some mutual defence force than to trust our partnership with our established ally in the United States. If history is any guide this will not end well, and Australia will be hung out to dry once again.
Blind Freddy may not have been a student of history, but even he could see what is playing out. It appears our current government and leadership must have missed school that day.
