Decades growing up with the history of war, I stood this morning as a minute’s silence overwhelmed the mundane.

Around me Churchill’s “The Second World War” volumes, “Monash’s Letters” in twin bio, Beaumont’s “Broken Nation Australia in the Great War”, Edwards’ “Australia and the Vietnam War”, Groom’s “A Storm in Flanders”, Tuchman’s “The Guns of August”, Rees’ “The Lancaster Men”, Faber’s “Munich 1938”, Gilberts’s “The Holocaust”, Stanley’s “Alamein the Australian Story”, Toland’s “In Mortal Combat Korea”, Calder’s “The People’s War Britain 1939-1945”, Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” sat among others across all eras, epochs and theatres.

As the Last Post played, my skin went cold as always. It can’t be helped. It is the spirit of loss.

Then I remembered that all wars are fought for political aims. Yet, I will always declare that only those fought for the protection of nations who value freedom, equality and the protection of the weak warrant sacrifice—that those who wage barbarism for bloodlust and sadistic phantasmagoria are evil. That they—who can’t stomach pluralism and tolerance must never find voice on the streets of liberty, never be celebrated in our schools, and never be promoted by our mainstream media.

That is the only politics that matters. It is that on which future governments in the West will be laid.

© 2024 Adam Parker.

Picture credit: © 2024 Adam Parker. Caulfield Park, Melbourne, Australia November 2024. The “Lone Pine” from the 1915 Gallipoli battlefield lives on in this seedling now fully matured and memorialised over decades of Remembrance Days.