And the Band Played I Should Be So Lucky!
By Max Gross
While the Abbevillian Abbott government continues its "emergency Budget" onslaught upon the powerless, the disenfranchised and the unemployed, the flags are out, brass buffed and sphincters braced to commemorate the centenary of the First World War.
In his speech on Monday (4 August) our pretentious, asinine prime minister declared the "sacrifice" of millions was "in a good cause".
Now, Tony Abbott's gift of the gaff is renowned and he wears his stupidity with pride usually associated with self-apppointed Masters of the Universe, much like the pompous gits who started WW1, but I couldn't let this one slip through to the mitt without remark.
What was the cause? And what the fuck was so "good" about it? Fellow bleeders, let us cogitate.
Kitted out in diverse uniforms that looked identical when soaked in blood and mud, the so-called "Great War" slaughtered 14 million human beings and maimed 20 million.
Read that last sentence again.
In the words of historian Norman Stone, "the world went from 1870 to 1940" in just 4 years, starting on horseback and ending with blitzkrieg.
In bleak, black irony, the writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine (himself a physician) called it the "vaccinated apocalypse" because medical advances were greater then than at any time before - or since.
The mass slaughter was such that a century later, in France and throughout Europe, body bits still pop up, their original owners only "Known Unto God".
In just 4 years Europe was ravaged as never before, 4 empires collapsed and the spoils were divided in such a way that bloody spasms continue to this very day, especially and specifically in the Middle East.
But there was no conscription in Australia. Then, as now, Aussies didn't like being told what to do and insisted on their democratic right to wilful idiocy. Our "Diggers" were all volunteers, a willing force of deluded patriots, ignorant fools and irresponsible twats.
Most Aussies considered themselves British (Some still do, right, Tony?). And everyone was convinced the fight would be over in a jiffy and the lads would all be "home for Christmas".
Better hurry and inlist or you'll miss out on the adventure of a lifetime.
Some of those lifetimes didn't last a day after setting foot on foreign soil.
Most volunteers were kids, still in their teens, some just 15 years old which really isn't old enough to be massacred in the mud of faraway lands they had scarcely heard of and knew even less about.
More than 100,000 Australians volunteered. Sixty thousand died. Try to imagine the injured.
All in Abbott's "good cause", his monarchist wet dream: for King and Cuntry.
In his masterpiece "Gallipoli", Les Carlyon quotes Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander White, an old fart at 33 who was severely wounded by shells. No, not the pretty ones scattered along the shores of the Aegean, the hellish ones that came pounding out of Turkish artillery. In his diary White wrote: "I do not want to speak about the war. If I let myself think too much about it my nerves would go. Have seen things and done things I want to forget."
Well, Tony Abbott can be accused of many things but certainly not of thinking too much.
One thing's for sure. If the victorious Allies had not imposed their greedy, punitive "reparation" excesses on defeated Germany - as if only the Axis powers were responsible for Gotterdammerung - a certain angry young Corporal Hitler may well have been history... sans World War Two.
Now THAT would have been a worthy cause.
Meanwhile, today - NOW - history repeats. In Syria... and Iraq... and Afghanistan... and Gaza... and Sudan... and Nigeria... And, of course, Ukraine. And so on and on and on...
Lest We Forget MY ARSE.
The big difference these days is the massive civilian - children - death toll.
Christ help you if you're some poor shmuck herding goats in Yemen. Chances are you'll end up collateral damage in USAnia's eternal "war-on-terror" in which everyone's a suspect and everyone's a potential target.
Finally, a wee ditty from the trenches of the "war-to-end-all-wars."
"I don't want to be a soldier,
I don't want to go to war,
I'd rather stay at home,
Around the streets to roam,
And live on the earnings of a well-paid whore.
I don't want a bayonet up my arsehole,
I don't want my bollocks shot away,
I'd rather stay in England,
In merry merry England,
And fuck my bloody life away."
The author was Anonymous and I only hope the talented bugger got home intact and lived to a ripe old age among clean sheets, loving arms and streams of whisky.
Happy Centenary, fellow bleeders.
Oh, and the cause? A tiff among royal relatives.
As any chessplayer will tell you, kings and queens use knights, bishops and pawns to do their dirty work.
Belligerence, hubris and anachronistic dogma, like Cicero's Damoclesian sword, haunt us still.
Luckily, as the Stranglers sing, there's always the sun.
