INCONSISTENCY IN WAR.

Thursday May 8, 2025, marked 80 years since the guns fell silent in Europe. If we take the words of Marshal Foch, “This is not peace, this is an armistice to last around 20 years,” it was the conclusion to an event that was set in motion by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife nearly 31 years earlier with an almost 21-year break between the day the guns fell silent on Monday November 11, 1918 and when hostilities resumed on Sunday September 3, 1939.

At the Versailles Peace Conference, Germany was forced to sign the War Guilt Clause and saddled with a crippling reparations bill. The First World War was precipitated by a powder keg the fuse of which was lit when in an act of ethnic chauvinism, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife entered Sarajevo, and a radicalized young man by the name of Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the couple. The arrival on that day was described by a newspaper as “a studied insult,” but it was the single act by a man in a country that Australia, Great Britain, France and Russia saw as an ally that set off a chain of events, culminating in the First World War in August 1914.

The Second World War saw the same but a far more brutal version of the enemy from the First. This time, it was not the Kaiser, but an Austrian-born dictator who scapegoated the Jewish people over the signing of the War Guilt Clause and a belief that they controlled the money while poor Germans had nothing. He was deliberately conflating it with Zionism.

With the liberation of the concentration and death camps by the Allies, shocking images that brought shivers of revulsion were seen by families at home. Then, once Japan was defeated and stories and images of survivors of prison camps were made available, people who didn’t actually serve in the war developed vehement anti-Japanese sentiments, alongside those who served.

In stark contrast, the horrors of what is occurring in Palestine and Gaza seems to not register with some world leaders. In Hungary, Netanyahu was able to visit, and Trump met with him. In Australia, former Leader of the Opposition, despite a warrant being issued for Netanyahu’s arrest, claimed that he would be welcome to visit Australia.

Whether or not Hamas is a terrorist organisation is one thing, but those of us who support Palestine are accused of being terrorist sympathisers when we are not. Personal prejudice seems to be a serious deciding factor here. Gavrilo Princip should not be held up as a folk hero for assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand. What needs to be remembered is that at times in history, the spark that lights the flame that ignites the powder keg is lit by the allied side and that it does not justify the brutality that is inflicted.