Bu ziyaret Turkiye devletine kufur edenlere ilgi arttigindan degildir tabiki!

"Avustralya Büyükelçisi Peter Doyle Diyarbakýr Büyükþehir Belediyesi Baþkaný Osman Baydemir'i ziyaret etti. . . .

Büyükelçi Doyle, "Umarým inceledikten sonra Avustralya'ya gelmeye karar verirsiniz. Biz de sizleri aðýrlamaktan zevk duyarýz" dedi. ilginize: http://www.silvanmucadele.com/news_detail.php?id=2602 http://www.yuksekovahaber.com/haber/buyukelciden-baydemire-ziyaret-30264.htm http://www.haberciniz.biz/haber/avusturya-buyukelcisinden-baydemire-ziyaret-diyarbakir--821791.html

A day for remembrance and perspective
MARTIN FLANAGAN April 18, 2009
NEXT weekend is the Anzac round, its highlight being Essendon and Collingwood at the 'G. Among his many ideas, this stands as one of Kevin Sheedy's most successful (and certainly better than telling the Tigers' faithful they had the team to win a premiership this year).
One of my brothers has a painting by Martin Tighe of two footballers, one Essendon, one Collingwood, battling it out on the MCG. The players in the painting don't look like modern footballers. They look like Essendon players of John Coleman and Dick Reynolds' time and Collingwood players of Lou Richards and Albert Collier's time, like eternal figures. Round the ground, where advertising banners customarily hang, are place names such as Gallipoli, Villers-Bretonneux and Kokoda, each written in a vivid, distinctive way as if to remind us each battle has a character entirely its own.
I get all that. In fact, if a visitor to Australia were to ask me for a Melbourne experience, one of those I'd nominate would be Anzac Day in the city. Arrive mid-morning when the march is on and the military bands are playing. Stand under the clocks at Flinders Street where American GIs met Aussie girls during World War II. Not that everyone was impressed by what they saw at the time, among them painter Albert Tucker. But Tucker had been working in a hospital at Heidelberg where solders with serious war injuries were kept.
I'd also go to Young & Jackson's and see Chloe, the naked nymph who came to Melbourne as a French painting for the Great Exhibition of 1880 and ended up in a pub. Lots of diggers had a drink with Chloe on their last leave before going overseas. Maybe, for some young men who didn't come back, it was the only naked woman they ever saw.

After the visitor to our city had a beer with Chloe, I'd tell them to make their way to the 'G, to take a leisurely stroll beside the river around which the city of Melbourne evolved from a settlement called Bearbrass, having previously been the place where the clans of what is now called Kulin nation gathered for ceremonies and games, including, in all likelihood, one in which a possum skin stuffed with charcoal was kicked in the air.

Then I'd tell the visitor about Collingwood and Essendon, one team from the city's 19th century slum, the other an outer suburban club with a Protestant flavour transformed by an Irish Catholic visionary called Kevin Sheedy. He invented the Anzac Day game, which seems to get bigger by the year.

But if the visitor to our country were an intelligent person with an independent perspective, I think they would ask me a question or two. They might, for example, ask me if this is an uncritical celebration of war? I would point out to them that the Anzacs fought the Turks and there is a Turkish presence in the Anzac Day commemoration. Some years ago, I attended a function put on by the president of the Turkish sub-branch of the RSL, Ramazan Altintas, at which the speaker was Bruce Ruxton, then the face of the Returned & Services League. Bruce, who offended most minorities at one time or another, spoke in his usual wayward and picturesque fashion, but the fact was he came in good spirit. And was received the same way.
I'd also point out to a visitor that Anzac Day speaks to me about being Australian in a way which has nothing to do with killing. I cherish the stories about Australian privates refusing to salute English officers because respect has to be earned. The Australian army, unlike the British, did not execute its own men in World War I. That, in my book, is something to be proud of. The English said the Australians lacked discipline but, if the general trend of reports is to be believed, the Australians proved themselves as fighters at Gallipoli. We were then, as a nation, just 14 years old — in our adolescence. Gallipoli became our bloody initiation rite.

But if we're going to promote war on the vast scale that is now implicit in the Anzac Day commemorations, we have to show some discrimination. Each Anzac Day on the evening news, we hear children repeating the statement that the Anzacs died defending our liberty. I would argue that is untrue. The Anzacs died invading a country (Turkey) with which we had no difference other than those determined by imperial alignments. If we want to talk about Australian soldiers dying to defend our freedom, talk about Kokoda.

We should never forget that Gallipoli was a military fiasco. The ineptitude of those in charge was as much responsible for the deaths of the thousands of young Australians as Turkish bullets. I would argue that the invasion of Iraq was a disaster on the scale of Gallipoli in terms of the lack of real knowledge about the task in hand that those ordering the invasion possessed when making their bold decisions.

I am not anti-American. I believe America saved us in World War II. One of the most moving stories to do with the bombing of Darwin in February 1942 concerns the 10 American Kittyhawk pilots who flew at the hundreds of Japanese war planes. Only one survived.
But those who argue for war in any country need to be endlessly questioned.

For example, what treatment do we expect Australian soldiers will receive if captured in a future Asian war with Guantanamo Bay as a precedent? I ask as the son of a serviceman who was fortunate to survive captivity and the experience of the Burma Railway during World War II.
Nor am I saying that football shouldn't pay its respects to what is now ritually referred to as the Anzac legend.

We all know that legends are stories created by the zoom lens of history, which amplifies certain facts at the expense of others. The Anzac legend is strong enough to let other truths about war in.

http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/a-day-for-remembrance-and-perspective-20091124-j326.html

One-sided thinking on Gallipoli an injustice
MARTIN FLANAGAN April 24, 2010
Comments 23
LEGENDS are like earthquakes. They happen. Afterwards, we try to understand the forces that created them. Anzac is an Australian legend that has a roughly analogous place to the Civil War in the American psyche. Both are stories of young nations encountering the horrors of modern warfare for the first time - that is, wars fought with repeating rifles and machineguns and appalling casualty rates. Both conflicts represent massive and unprecedented change.
As popular culture, however, what the Civil War has that Anzac doesn't is the view of both sides. In 1983, when his yacht, Australia 2, won the America's Cup, owner Alan Bond acknowledged that at one stage his crew had been losing but added "it was just like Gallipoli, and we won that one".
It would be interesting to know exactly how that comment was received in lounge rooms across Australia. Did it feel "right" to most who heard it? My guess is that it did.

Gallipoli was a military disaster. We should note that in justice to the young men who died there. Do we owe them less than we owe those who die in bushfires like Black Saturday? We should also note it in justice to future generations. The voices that urged Australia into the invasion of Iraq were of the same character as those that propelled Australia to Gallipoli in 1914. In the context of Anzac, we also need to note the extent of the debacle to appreciate the stature of the major Australian characters who emerged from it - like, for example, General Sir John Monash.
The planning at Gallipoli was a farce. Six weeks before the landing, by way of military intelligence, the British officer commanding the operation, General Sir Ian Hamilton, was equipped with two small guidebooks on Turkey and a text book on the Turkish army. Ellis Ashmead Bartlett, an English journalist covering the campaign who correctly foresaw from the outset that it was doomed, said intelligence would be acquired "at the point of a bayonet". And it was.

Monash was an engineer. Born in West Melbourne to Jewish German immigrants, Monash was of the century just beginning, a man who understood steel and concrete and modern automation. His battles were meticulously planned. The British prime minister Lloyd George described Monash "as the most resourceful general in the whole of the British Army". Monash is a giant figure in Australian history.

Propaganda was involved in shaping the popular view of Gallipoli from the start. Take the case of John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the man with the donkey. Within six weeks of his death, he had been conscripted into the propaganda war, a newspaper report describing him as ''a six-foot Australian'' with ''a woman's hands'' who said in a British-Australian accent, ''I'll take this fellow next.''

Simmo was a five-foot-eight Geordie with a stoker's hands who spoke in dialect and had fierce Labor politics. His first biographer, a fan of Churchill and acquaintance of Sir Robert Menzies, stripped him of his politics. There was no mention of boozing or fighting. The real Simmo was left in a grave at Gallipoli.

What the Australians won at Gallipoli was huge respect, including from their enemy. It really is time we started making clear to young Australians that the Anzacs didn't die protecting Australia from being invaded. Rather, we were invading a country on the other side of the world - to wit, Turkey - with whom we had no difference as a people outside the larger politics of the day.

Surely it is time we owed Turkey, and Turkish Australians, that respect. Look at the respect Turkey shows our dead.
I ask this question most seriously. Does any country in the world - other than Turkey - permit a people who tried to invade it to commemorate the fact of that attempted invasion on their shores each year? I know of not a single one. Imagine if the descendants of the Japanese pilots who bombed Darwin held an emotional service beneath the Japanese flag on the shores of Darwin Harbour each year.
My impression is that within Turkey the legend of Anzac got absorbed into the legend of Ataturk, the so-called father of modern Turkey, who, as a young man, championed the Turkish defence at Gallipoli.
It was Ataturk who declared to the mothers of Australia that their sons lay in friendly soil. A group of about 80 Turkish Australians march each year in Melbourne on Anzac Day. Anzac Day would not be the same without them.
Martin Flanagan is a senior writer.

Comments
23 comments
Yes, this most certainly needs to be pointed out as often as possible. It is no reflection on the courage and fighting qualities of ANZAC soldiers that Gallipoli was a poorly planned British 'adventure' of little military importance. What a waste of life for no apparent purpose. As someone who has visited Gallipoli, I can vouch for the reverence in which the Turkish people hold the site and the esteem they hold for Australians and New Zealanders.
dee-em Brookvale, Sydney - April 24, 2010, 12:08PM

I think you raise a valid point Martin, it is definately food for thought....
Lucy Grundy Melbourne - April 24, 2010, 12:35PM

At last an article that searches for the truth & not some rose coloured puff piece. As a child of a WW2 serviceman parent who didn't glorify war but knew & was part of horrorble events we were taught that jingoistic and distorted stories would be for the most part attempts to justify the bombast of the story telling glory seekers. Would Simpson Fitzpatrick welcome the attention of backslapping hail fellow well met Colonel Blimps, I think not. The first casualty of war is truth and a publishing industry intent on cashing in will continue to promote the myths as truth. Any life lost in any conflict is one too many. We should treasure their memory for their sacrifice to the folly of their 'betters' .

JohnS Ryde - April 24, 2010, 12:33PM
There is not one thing that is glorious about war and why we commemorate this crap while we have again invaded two nations who have done us no harm and helped to slaughter a couple of million people is beyond me.
We whine each year "lest we forget" and then wonder who we can bomb next.
And Gallipoli was a total disaster, our soldiers invaded, murdered and slunk out like the cowards they were.
Now we hide in old Taliban forts in Oruzgan and pretend we are helping Afghans while locking up Afghan refugees.
Marilyn - April 24, 2010, 12:57PM

You make a great point about Turkish hospitality Martin, a point we should reflect upon every April 25th.
There are a few points worth considering whenever this type of discussion arises, which is every year.
Gallipoli wasn't a waste of time, poorly executed, you bet but the idea had strategic merit.
If it had been successful, Turkey may have fallen by the end of 1915 early '16 opening up access to Russia and a proper second front (the ANZAC's would probably then have fought along side the Russian's on that Eastern front) WWI may then have ended some time late in 1916, early '17. No Communist Revolution, no cold war and maybe no WWII, Happy Days!
WWI was a global conflict between two superpowers, one of which our federated states had only 14 years earlier been crown colonies of, with that in mind it's easier to see why we became involved. Does anyone seriously think that we would not have?
Lastly as time goes on we seem to less and less remember that their is an NZ in ANZAC. Particularly and in relation to the commentary about Gallipoli.
Homer J South Yarra - April 24, 2010, 1:02PM

Hi Marilyn still the anti-australian australian I see.
When attempting to view events in history many of the people of today fall into the trap of "Historical fallacy" where the people of the past are judged by today's moral standards, which taken to the extreme leads anyone to decide that anyone mentioned in history is immoral and fails to take into account different social structures, technologies, beliefs, political systems and cultural influences etc of the time. In ignoring history's lessons and denying the limitations of past people we devalue their gains and are doomed to repeat their mistakes. I view it as cultural elitism over the dead through ignorance. Where as those relying on verbal history don't suffer in this way from codification rather they suffer from "cognitive bias" and can tailor the history to match whatever agenda is needed. Of course those social scientists at uni who like to dabble in social engineering wouldn't mention it to the politicians since the regard it as a kind of ethical bracket creep, which is why we will never have aboriginal reconciliation since once it nears it is pushed away again for the political agenda. Thank you Paul Keating for promoting historical fallacy and believing in the idiocy of race memory and so forever denying us reconciliation.
bill sydney - April 24, 2010, 1:12PM

I respect the decency and respect the Turks pay to their former enemies.
We Australians should overcome our blinkered thinking. We think that our enemies were/are always evil bastards and that we are always right. We think that we are great when we "win" (say "against" Japan) and great when we "lose" (say "against Turkey). Gee ... we are heroes whatever happens. Heads we win. Tails you lose!
Both Sides - April 24, 2010, 1:09PM

A big thankyou is due to Martin Flanagan. I have lived a large part of my life in a non-English speaking country and it is extraordinary how the Anglo Saxons still persist with a goodies and baddies version of historical events. Flanagan is absolutely correct in asking what Australians would think if the Japanese wanted to honour their dead in Darwin. The Anzacs participated in an invasion force that snuck up on the Turks in the middle of the night, invaded their country and tried to kill as many Turkish soldiers as possible. Last year I attended an Anzac Day service at which the enemy at Gallipoli was labelled as "evil." Australia needs to grow up. It does the fallen soldiers on both sides no disrespect to tell the truth. It is really becoming distasteful to observe the indoctrination of the young and how Anzac Day has become a day of uncommonly large profit for television stations and other spruikers of nationalistic propaganda. I recently received a brochure on Anzac Day from a would be politician at the next election. There was not a word about the futility and the tragedy of war. It dealt exclusively with how magnificent the Australian soldiers were - nothing else. It is noble to remember the soldiers who died. But it is just as important to remind ourselves that it is our responsibility to ensure that it never happens again.
Vero Blue Mountains - April 24, 2010, 1:16PM

Martin- you paint Turkey in a favourable light ( "Surely it is time we owed Turkey, and Turkish Australians, that respect")You have omitted that in the same year of the Gallipoli landing in 1915, Turkey perpetrated the mass genocide of around 1million Armenians. Atatuerk himself who at the very least particpated if not spearheaded the campaign to eradicate the Armenians.
To this day Turkey refuse to acknowledge their involvement and cut off political and economic ties with other states brave enough to brand them perpetrators in a Genocide.
Perhaps we will show Turkey the respect they deserve when they admit to the atrocities that the world has forgotten.
Amc East Brighton - April 24, 2010, 1:27PM

Bill in Sydney
Would you like to address the article, or do you prefer to write a generalised sub-standard university thesis about ... what exactly?
Would you like to argue that we weren't an invading force on foreign land? Would you like to argue, ala Bondy, that we won? Would you like to explain the behaviour of some modern Australians who travel to Turkey without a single clue as to what actually happened, and without the slightest sign of respect for the incredible hospitality of the Turks?
Or not.
Bill Melbourne - April 24, 2010, 1:33PM

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/onesided-thinking-on-gallipoli-an-injustice-20100423-tj50.html