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War

There is an honoured tradition of battalion histories in Australia, particularly from World War I. The best of them tell us something of the individuals who served Australia well. This book takes battalion histories to an entirely new level. It is the most complete, and the most absorbing, account of a battalion I have ever read.

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In early 2001, several Roman Catholic nuns stood trial in Brussels for crimes against humanity for their part in the genocide in Rwanda. Rwandan nationals, they were charged with violating new provisions of Belgian national law, which make participation in genocide and crimes against humanity anywhere in the world a violation of the law of that country. Unlike the case of Slobodan Milosevic, who awaits trial before an international tribunal in the Hague, or recent well-publicised proceedings in England against Augusto Pinochet, which were based on an extradition request from a Spanish judge investigating the former dictator for crimes against Spanish citizens in Chile, the Belgian law grants jurisdiction against anyone, who commits certain types of crimes against anyone regardless of citizenship, anywhere. In other words, the Belgian system has nationalised international crimes and international criminal law jurisdiction.

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We’ve all seen the video. The black and white images are washed out, almost solarised, by the heat and glare of a Baghdad morning in 2007. As the men walk and mingle on the street, we can make out the length of their hair, pick out the skinny from the stocky, and identify what they are wearing, loose trousers, casual shirts – one with distinctive broad stripes. Mercifully, we cannot discern their individual features. All the while, the Apache helicopter hovers, unseen and unheard, its cameras trained on the men below. The crew exchange terse messages with US troops in the area and their commanders back at the flight line. Having identified weapons that the men carry and confirmed that they are not coalition forces, the crew request and receive permission to engage, manoeuvring the gunship to get a clearer shot. 

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Justice Anthony Besanko’s dismissal of Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation proceedings against a trio of mastheads – The Age, The Canberra Times, and The Sydney Morning Herald, at the time all owned by Fairfax – was a comprehensive victory for those newspapers. It was a vindication of their serious investigative journalism on matters of high public interest. And it was a devastating blow to the reputation of Roberts-Smith. 

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Bomber Command operations cost about 3,500 Australian lives in World War II. This was more than five times the number of Australians who died in the Battle of Kokoda from July to November 1942. Yet the strategic bombing offensive over Germany has never held a comparable place in the national memory of war. 

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Shadowline: The Dunera diaries of Uwe Radok edited by Jacquie Houlden and Seumas Spark

by
March 2023, no. 451

Uwe Radok was born in 1916 in East Prussia to a family of Christian converts who identified as German Protestant. Nevertheless, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, the Radoks were classified as Jews – their five children Mischlinge, of mixed ancestry. In 1938, the family applied to emigrate to Australia. When their visas finally arrived in August 1939, it was too late.

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Writing in the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the life of a king was made up of two objects: to extend his rule beyond the frontiers; and to make it more absolute within them. Reading those lines, I couldn’t help but think of Vladimir Putin, whose primary political goals seem to mirror those of absolutist monarchs. Rousseau was implying that war was an instrument wielded by capricious princes to serve their own interests. Not long after Rousseau, Antoine-Henri Jomini was the first military strategist to unpack the idea that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Many politicians and military strategists throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century agreed, whether democrats, fascists, or communists. General Ludendorff, Marshal Shaposhnikov, and Mao Zedong all came to the same conclusion: war and politics – one and the same thing.

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As the war in Syria enters its second decade, the human scale of the catastrophe is difficult to comprehend. Shocked by the security service’s torture of children who had graffitied the words ‘Down with the regime’ on a wall in the city of Daraa in 2011, nationwide demonstrations rose up against Bashar al-Assad’s tyrannical government. When I ask my now-exiled Syrian colleagues what life was like under the Assad family, they struggle for historical parallels before agreeing that, for them, it resembled Stalin’s Soviet Union and North Korea (a regime the current president’s father, Hafez Al-Assad, looked to for inspiration).

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This is a difficult book to read, not because of its length (nearly 500 pages without references); nor because of its density. It is because this study of prisoners of war in Europe during World War II documents suffering on an almost unimaginable scale. In this theatre of war, more than twenty million servicemen and servicewomen fell into enemy hands. Millions did not survive captivity.

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At first sight, the title of David Horner’s new book, The War Game, is an uncharacteristically flippant reference by a serious historian to a deadly serious business. Horner has taken the term from writers such as Jonathan Swift and Horace Walpole, who saw war being treated as a game in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The carnage of the industrial-scale wars of the twentieth century, with their current reverberations in Ukraine, makes the phrase seem almost offensive, as does the frightening prospect of a full-scale war between the United States and China over Taiwan.

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