By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
April 25, ANZAC Day, is a national celebration in Australia commemorating the World War 1 campaign, ordered by Winston Churchill in London, for Australian and New Zealand (NZ) forces to land at Gallipoli, and attempt to march on the Ottoman Empire capital at Istanbul.
It has become the equivalent of Memorial Day in the US, which comes a month later. Like the American commemoration, for Australians and New Zealanders it is now meant to celebrate all the wars they have fought. Very recently, the ceremonies include a “Welcome to Country” speech by a tribal elder of the Australian indigenous peoples. They were not allowed to serve in the Australian forces until the numbers of willing whites were beginning to run low in 1917.
ANZAC stood for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. That wasn’t a combination of armies of two independent states. It was a single unit of two colonial divisions formed in December 1914 and commanded by a British general, William Birdwood, with his staff of officers from the British Indian Army.
This was an empire operation: Australia was a self-governing dominion of British colonies in 1901; New Zealand the same in 1907. However, they remained under British constitutional, legal, military, and secret service control until the Japanese Army forced the surrender of the British at Singapore in 1942 and headed southward.
Japan did more for Australian and New Zealand independence than the anti-imperialism of Australians and New Zealanders. By contrast, the Indians, fifteen thousand of whom were landed with the Anzacs, successfully fought the British to achieve their independence in 1947; Australia and New Zealand followed with legislation of 1986 and 1983, respectively. By then, however, CIA penetration of both ruling elites had succeeded in replacing the overt British Empire with a subvert US Empire. And so it is today, with a Zionist twist.
The 1915 ANZAC operation was a total failure, ending in ignominious retreat.
Not only did the Turks drive the Allies off with one of the gravest campaign tolls of the war; estimated numbers of dead and wounded were almost 350,000 – slightly more than half on the Allied side. The Turks then began the genocide of the Armenian population, killing more than 1.5 million civilians; they followed that with attacks on the Greeks.
The Australian casualty rate was about 15% dead; the comparable NZ death rate was 19%; the Indian casualty rate, 10%; the British rate (including Irish and Newfoundlanders) was 12%.
The Turkish retelling of the history omits that the principal forces which defended the heights and took the greatest casualties were conscripted Arabs from Syria and Iraq and Kurds from Mosul. Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk), then commander of the Ottoman 19th Division at the front, held his Turkish infantry and cavalry in reserve to defend the northward road to Istanbul. The death rate for these Arab soldiers was at least 27%, probably higher.
Since 1996, and with government authorization since 2006, descendants of the Ottomans who fought and defeated the Australians have been allowed to march alongside the Australian veterans through the Australian cities. Note that in the state press corporation report of 2006, these soldiers are described as “Turkish”, not as Arabs.
Australia is now permanently at war with the Arabs and Muslims with a Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, appointed from the Jewish community by the federal government to represent the opinions of 120,000 Australian Jews in an attack on the opinions of 815,000 Australian Muslims. Together with a Royal Commission currently under way to recommend criminalizing the second group’s defence against the first, Australia is adopting the ideology of race-hate fascism to advance its domestic, intercommunal warmaking and its foreign warmaking (against Russia, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, etc.).
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