Viewpoint – Painful lessons from history

Anzac Day 2026 occurs in the shadow of a deteriorating international order, making this year’s commemorations even more poignant than usual. George C. Marshall’s famous quote, “The price of peace is eternal vigilance,” takes on added significance.

Those who remember their high school history lessons will recall how during the 1930s Hitler and Nazi Germany trampled over the League of Nations (the international body formed after WWI to ensure world peace through collective security). In the space of a few short years Germany re-armed, reoccupied the Rhineland, forced Anschluss with Austria, dismembered Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland. 

British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was the champion of ‘appeasement.’ This was the policy of giving Hitler what he wanted in the hope he would be satisfied, and war averted.

As history shows, Hitler and Germany weren’t appeased and instead the world, including New Zealand, was plunged into a global conflict in which an estimated 60 to 75 million people lost their lives (50 to 56 million directly from war, an additional 19 to 28 million deaths from war-related disease and famine).

In the 1930s, each unchallenged act of aggression effectively emboldened further expansion, the lack of any consequences signalling weakness. In recent times the current United Nations has faced a similar threat with repeated and flagrant violations of international law effectively ignored

In this respect, I wonder what our brave soldiers who sacrificed their lives in wars would think of those countries and their leaders who have stood idly by allowing other nations to start unprovoked wars, kill innocent women and children in their tens of thousands, destroy hospitals and use starvation as a weapon of war. 

In the 1930s, the League of Nations failed because the world would not act, and in particular, the powerful countries who had the ability to do so. The United Nations today has been similarly undermined, even when confronted with the apocalyptic images of total annihilation that are beamed across the world for all to see.

For when it comes to ‘eternal vigilance’ we seem to have entered an era in which few world leaders possess the necessary humanity or courage to challenge the perpetrators of such barbarity. Instead, most leaders have remained silent and therefore complicit.

But it’s not just them. In a time when the truth is routinely distorted, it is the public who must make their leaders accountable. That’s a responsibility we must all bear if we are to truly honour those who paid the ultimate price. For the peaceful existence we enjoy today as a result of their sacrifice does not come with a guarantee for the future.

And if we don’t, there is yet another historical saying that springs to mind: “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”