REMEMBERING WORLD WAR ONE AND WHITLAM

Paul Norton at Larvatus Prodeo reminds me that it is now 35 years since the dismissal of the Whitlam Government and 92 years since the end of the First World War.

So what was the most significant event in Australian History – or should we ask these questions?

I was travelling on a bus, and as we passed an RSL Club I was reminded (yesterday now) that it was the 11th day of the 11th month. Later at the 11th hour, I heard the last post sounded over the bus radio. The newspapers remember this date, but otherwise it could have been a normal day. Nobody has any experience of the First World War and those who are still alive were too young.

The First World War was “the war to end all wars”, a prediction that sadly did not hold. It demonstrated what industrial wars could do, and was repeated with Afghanistan the among the latest installments:

Was the Whitlam Dismissal a conspiracy or merely a stuff-up? The criticism of a reforming government that changed the country for the better is easily made but harder to sustain. Those fallible human beings of 35 years ago seem like giants compared to mental and moral pygmies that seem to inhabit the political representative institutions of today.
It could have been a conspiracy:

The American Century may well be over. The question is whether the transnational corporations and the financial industry need the nation state, and perhaps they do. But can an highly indebted US, ironically indebted to Communist China, sustain its level of threat power combined with covert operations and over violence to maintain its pre-eminence with tearing itself apart? At what point will the steady degradation of civil and democratic life in the US simply become unacceptable? How close is the tipping point?

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