Be careful Rob speaking the truth about sacred ANZAC Day.Malcolm Turnbull just had an SBS Reporter sacked for tweeting truths about this day.

McIntyre's tweet included "Wonder if the poorly-read, largely white, nationalist drinkers and gamblers pause today to consider the horror that all mankind suffered."

Nothing could be more offensive and further from the truth. On all of those counts, that certainly did not characterize the 2000 people who attended the 10 a.m. commemorative service that I attended in Warragul.

David

Arjay,

'....truths about this day"

Do you mean the actual day of the landing or successive commemorative ANZAC Days or the 100th Anniversary one?

Why does this author focus on the masculine militarism of war? Are there any other types of war? All the negative and shameful behaviour is carried out by men because up until recently only men went to war. It is easy to point the finger at one particular gender when only one gender is involved. Men do incredibly courageous things in war as well and have saved us from tyranny on many occasions.

What is the point of highlighting the masculinity of those who did immoral acts under war time conditions? Why not just point out that immoral acts were done by human beings unless you are trying to suggest that had women been at the front none of this would have happened?

Of course women cannot rape men so that would not happen but is rape the only atrocity or even the worst one? Women are equally able to inflict the most heinous torture given the right circumstances.

The past had its good parts and its bad parts. Men did what they did and women did what they did. Unless you can prove that war would have been different had the gender roles been reversed then it is rather cowardly to try and suggest that there is a fundamental flaw in men that means they would be the more atrocious.

Some of the things our soldiers did might challenge the ‘purity of the nation’ but they do not challenge masculine militarism unless you can provide arguments that feminine militarism would be any better.

I have only one thing to say on all the Anzac events, and this is from one who had relatives serve and injured in this WW1 conflict.
All the suffering and loss is only because Britain is an ally of us and of course being a member of the British commonwealth, we were politically pressured to participate. Our pollies back in the day should have stood up and told the Empire to basically get lost! No one was actually invading Australia at the time, so why the heck should any Australians die in the name of defending the empire on european soil? madness is an understatement!

This was an opportunity at the time to have deep discussions about the relevance of being 'bossed' around by our former colonial masters, federation in 1901 did not go far enough in my humble opinion.

However, I'm probably out of step with the mindset and psychological status quo of those times. If such a situation was hypothetically happening today, do you think Australians would volunteer to rush over there and get involved because of the British empire??. . . err.. hardly likely!

That must be my old Scotch-Irish blood coming out! lol....

Rob is too young to remember that it was the women's vote that kept Menzies in power and forced conscript male youths, not yet men because they could not vote or drink alcohol, to war (Vietnam).

Just more proof that one sex is not superior to the other as imagined by Rob, who is a product of the feminist dominated education system and systemic politically correctness that prevail in Oz.

It is historical fact that 99% of those that handed out 'white feathers' during both World Wars were women.
Women also were very active in WW I in the pro-conscription movement.

In WW II an officer of my later acquaintance was home on leave from his unit, which was one of the Special Units.
He was told to wear civilian clothes when in Sydney and he had a collection of white feathers that he received before he went back to his clandestine unit, he said that they were all presented with "encouraging" remarks by women.
This bloke, whom I knew when he was our Adjutant for a time in the 1950s had spent much of the war behind enemy lines in Europe and in the Pacific.
I well remember writing up his service record when new AAB 83s were being issued and right through the war his units were simply "X Special"

Historically there have been women warriors and accounts label them as being somewhat brutal.

Despite the blathering of these anti-Anzac, anti-anything Australian malcontents, the Anzac crowds are steadily increasing.

Most Austalians have never heard of these whingers and whiners.

They will be back next year, along with anti- Christmas misanthropes, and every year after that until enough people bored with their misery and hatred and refuse to respond to them.

Tell me Rob are women capable of rape?
Do you not think that it's a simple outcome of culture that more women are not rapist. That our culture represses women and if they were truly free then they would be just as violent as us evil hetro men are?

Scott Mcintyre's comments were so stupid that that he deserved to be sacked. You can't look at Hiroshima in isolation. Of course it was an appalling loss of life but surely this is the nature of war.

People were terrified of the Japanese. They refused to surrender despite being in a hopeless situation. They had lost control of the sea around Japan and the country was slowly being destroyed by conventional bombing. When Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, the people running Japan realised that they too were vulnerable and that is why they surrendered.

True, Wattle, but had the first bomb been dropped on an area of open country I think that the Japanese would have got the message.
There was no need to bomb Nagasaki at all, but as the bombs were still largely experimental it was necessary to confirm the experiment before the Japs surrendered.

The Atomic Bombs did however save many lives overall both Allied and Japanese.
To have fought a land war on Japan would have cost thousands of lives, I had the opportunity in the 1950s of inspecting a small sampling of the Japanese defensive complexes and they were formidable.

Cobber

'Do you not think that it's a simple outcome of culture that more women are not rapist. That our culture represses women and if they were truly free then they would be just as violent as us evil hetro men are?'

It goes both ways. If women were 'truly free', men wouldn't have to keep on using gender-political weapons like rape to keep them under control (through terror).

Without the need to use various forms of violence to maintain their power over women, men would be free to desist from cultural dictates that link violence with masculinity and male 'honour'.

Sheesh Killarney, at least TRY to make sense...

Killarney,

You are obviously a strong supporter of women and their rights, so, do you think that it is fair that women in Australia, given that they are physically weaker than men, should not be allowed some means of defending themselves?
Something that might give them a chance?

Is Mise

Some women favoured the war, some didn't, with passionate opinions on both sides. You may have heard of the School of Arts riot in Brisbane in 1917, in which a huge fight broke out between pro- and anti-conscription women. The police had to be brought in to break it up - twice.

The WWI white feather issue is vastly overblown. This is because the campaign was funded and organised by very well-connected members of the gentry in Britain and Australia and, because the establishment in both countries was fiercely pro-war, the campaign received a lot of publicity at the time and a central place in all historical accounts of the war in the decades since.

By contrast, women's considerable and active role in the WWI anti-war and anti-conscription movements is rarely acknowledged, even on the left. This is partly because women in war are rarely acknowledged, except as nurses and sock-knitters, and partly because peace and anti-war movements have been all but surgically removed from the official accounts of all wars throughout history.

In 1915, 1200 women from 12 different countries, including Australia, attended the International Congress of Women for a Permanent Peace held at The Hague in the Netherlands. There was also The Women's Peace Army, also established in 1915, which drew large numbers to their rallies, even though the War Precautions Act cracked down on all forms of anti-war activity.

----
As for your query re whether it's fair for women to carry a weapon for self-defence ... as the law stands, a woman can be convicted of assault, grievous bodily harm or murder if she uses a weapon to defend herself from a rapist. She can also be arrested for even carrying a weapon for self-defence.

So, no, it's definitely not fair. However, the law will never change, because men will never let it happen. Not only will they scream 'discrimination', men have an irrational fear of women rising up and killing them - good old retribution. (It comes out all the time in OLO gender threads.

you wont stop rape in war.

although I must say the Americans have done a
remarkable job in restraining their troops in recent wars
in their attempt to win hearts and minds, they were prepared
to jail their soldiers for this kind of thing.

This is only because of mobile cameras and satellites recording
everything.

Males must find a female who will agree to have their offspring.
Females dont have the same problem of getting males to mate with
them. Especially in time of war, where death is ever close,
soldiers may see this as a last opportunity to leave their
genetic mark on the world. Plus, it does help to secure
territorial control, population wise, even if the individual soldier dies.

And of course, there is just, plain selfish cruelty, by many males
when the rule of law is absent.

The law of nature dictates that the males must compete for the
females. And so it is. They grab any opportunity to do so.

CHERFUL

'you wont stop rape in war'

No. But men's impunity against ever being convicted of rape in war CAN be stopped, or at least minimised. It's rare for men to be tried for war rape, especially if they are on the winning side. In virtually all wars, rape victims are deliberately ignored, unless there is political mileage to be gained. For example, rape committed by Serbian soldiers in Bosnia received worldwide publicity and was vastly exaggerated, but rape committed by Bosnians against Serbian women officially 'never happened'.

Two US studies 11 years apart have shown that 1 in 3 college men say that they would rape if they were sure they'd get away with it. The main reason men rape in war is because there is a very high chance they'll get away with it. And soldiers continue to get away with rape, because soldiers are glorified as heroes in most countries.

Also, your justifications for rape as being all about men 'leaving their genetic mark on the world' before they die is poppycock. Do civilian rapists need to leave their genetic mark on the world too, in case they get run over by a bus the next day? Do men diagnosed with a terminal illness need to rush off and rape the nearest woman?

If rape were so evolutionarily 'correct', then why do women find the experience so catastrophically traumatic, living the rest of their lives with PTSD? Why don't they just beatifically lie back and be glad that some nice rapist is helping them to leave their genetic mark on the world?