Friday 24 April 2015

Churchill's Bloody Disaster, Gallipoli.


 
        Tomorrow April 25th. our imperialist state will bring out all its regalia, pomp and ceremony, in an attempt to turn one of its most brutal blunders into a show of glory, and claim another victory for democracy. The event that  they will "celebrate"  will be the centenary of the battle of Gallipoli, a stupid, needless, blood bath of young men, dreamed up by the racist, fascist, Winston Churchill. At the time it was such a blundering disaster that Churchill lost his position in the government. The pomp and parades will be an attempt to airbrush the disaster aspect of the blunder out of our consciousness, and have it photo-shopped as all glory and honour.
      Our imperialist state will always glorify war, it needs war to protect its power and privileges, and ever opportunity will be taken to show war with pride and glory. There is no glory in war, it is a tactic whereby states protect and enhance their power, at the expense of the ordinary people. 
Anzac Day 25 April 2015: Gallipoli 100 years on
25 April 2015 marks the hundredth anniversary of the start of the British-led military invasion of Gallipoli on Turkey’s Dardanelle Peninsula, which resulted in over 200,000 dead and wounded in an eight-month period.
Gallipoli was a military disaster. Yet, a century on, politicians seeking to glorify the First World War, are calling the huge loss of life at Gallipoli "a price worth paying."

As the Australian government spends $300 million commemorating the WWI centenary, and using it to promote militarism and nationalist myths, veterans' groups have condemned the "nationalist circus" that Anzac Day has become.
The UK government, which is spending £60 million on its own nationalist circus commemorating WW1, has a number of Anzac Day events, including in London and Turkey. There will of course be little mention of Winston Churchill's role as prime mover of the Gallipoli catastrophe, which lead to his dismissal from the British government a hundred years ago.
Rather than celebrating the rewriting of history to promote new wars being waged on this 100th anniversary, it is important to remember what really happened at Gallipoli.
The No Glory website aims to capture the reality of what took place, with a dedicated page, Anzac Day 2015 - the Gallipoli disaster 100 years on, that has links to articles, videos, songs etc.
Among the features are two conflicting views of The Water Diviner, Russell Crowe's film about Gallipoli, which was Australia's highest grossing film in 2014. One reviewer says the film is anti-war, the other says the opposite.
And from that "revered" Western capitalist mouthpiece, The Wall Street Journal:

      The British government gave much consideration to the eventual division of the Ottoman lands once the straits were captured but very little to how the operation might ­actually be executed. The ­amateurish preparation and the resulting fiasco are ­recounted with sharp, taut precision in “Gallipoli: The End of the Myth,” Robin Prior’s near-definitive analysis of the campaign.
      The assumption that Britain would simply sweep to victory over second-rate Turkey was just the first of many errors of judgment. At each stumble, when a logical examination of the campaign would have had only one possible conclusion—withdrawal—Britain’s leaders doubled down, eventually committing a half-million troops to the Gallipoli ­Peninsula in a sequence of bloody landings and operations.
Read the full article HERE:

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