Worzels World - Lest We Learn

Whilst plying one of the many trades for which I am Jack of at the Maungaturoto RSA cemetery, I realised that of the world wars that were actually called world wars – and not provincial reconstructions or peacekeeping or pre-emptive defence or some other creative description of going somewhere overseas and killing people – very few veterans of those wars remain unburied.

The Second World War was only one Maungauroto-length life span ago. It became universally acknowledged that the leaders of the Nazi war machine – Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler – were evil men. The great cost in lives and liberty and the wholesale supply of death and destruction during that time has been firmly placed upon their shoulders. Yet by any real measure of human power and ability these men were lightweights. Any rugby-playing New Zealand farmer of the day could have dusted all of them in a pub carpark scrap and still had sufficient energy left for a game of pool and a pint.

So how did these men cop the blame for the deaths of more than a few strong Kiwi farmers, not to mention Polish, Russian, English, and French farmers, workers and wot not killed in battle, or the many Jews, gypsies and blacks who met their end in concentration camps?

How did these men who so obviously had so little power in and of themselves gain so much power in the world?

The answer of course is obvious. It was because so many others were prepared to go along with them. Most people hadn’t learned the lessons of history and consented to their evil, thereby granting them the power they had.

In the name of the Fatherland, Adolf Hitler had a vision of a unified Europe. He formed a plan to achieve this by mobilising a mighty military machine. He called it 'Blitzkrieg' (lightning war) and started a war that lasted five bitter years. Sovereign nations were forced to defend their freedom of independence or lose it to a dictator.

Not so many years later in the name of prosperity and co-operation, Hitler’s totalitarian vision was mirrored in a proposed European Union. Nations that had opposed, at great cost in men and resources, the Nazi brand of fascism, humbly applied to become part of a later day version of the same idea. Those who sacrificed so much to avoid governance by an Austrian tyrant dictator with a proven track record, volunteered to be ruled by unelected Brussels bureaucrats with no credentials whatsoever.

They didn’t learn from history.

Did these people know they were serving an evil cause led by evil men? No, they had been duped into believing that the cause was a noble one. One of the catch-cries at ANZAC day is ‘Lest We Forget’. Those who do forget past mistakes are destined to repeat them. The mistakes made by all those who consented to evil and destuctive plans are being repeated today. How many of us right now are lending our support to evil men, who if they stood on their own, would have no power at all?

The power of words is paramount in obtaining the consent necessary for power over people and their destinies. That, and ignorance of history. As we witness the spin and ‘fake news’ spewing from mainstream media outlets we need to be always sceptical of what we believe.

The propaganda spirit of Joseph Goebbels is alive and well and lying better and more convincingly than ever as modern day hegemony manifests in the global deployment of an American military machine. The predominant message is that NATO and the West know what’s best for everyone else. There is though a complete absence of any evidence that this claim is true. We have over the last decade witnessed the toppling of sovereign nation states to the ‘blitzkreig’ of US aggression. Afgahnistan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya have all been invaded and destabilised by US aggression. The US is now invading Syria and Yemen, two countries that posed absolutely no military threat whatsoever to America.

None of that though is within our control but what is in our control is where we stand as our own sovereign nation. That our own SAS have been deployed in aggressive military action in foreign lands and killing people who pose no threat to us is admitted. Now reliable evidence of the murder of civilians by New Zealand armed forces has been furnished by two investigative journalists with a proven record for exposing the truth. Are we going to learn from history or are we just going along with it?

n prof_worzel@hotmail.com

One of the catch-cries at ANZAC day is ‘Lest We Forget’. Those who do forget past mistakes are destined to repeat them.