Free Republic

Thousands gathered across Australia and New Zealand on Friday for Anzac Day, a public holiday commemorating military service members who fought and died during wartime. Anzac Day originally marked the nations' role in an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey during World War One, which resulted in 130,000 deaths on both sides of the conflict. In a key episode on April 25, 1915, thousands of troops from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) took part in an ill-fated amphibious invasion by British Empire forces on the area's narrow beaches. "It is now a century...

RUSSIA’S CZECHOSLOVAK LEGION of World War One was an army without a country. The 60,000-man unit, raised between 1915 and 1917, was made up of Czech and Slovak patriots keen to free their ancestral homeland from Austrian rule. By taking up arms in the name of the Russian Tsar, the men of the unit hoped that after the war the great powers would reward them with statehood. But when in 1917, the Bolsheviks rose to power following the collapse of Russia’s Romanov dynasty and then made a separate peace with the Central Powers, the Czechoslovak Legion suddenly found itself trapped...

As regular readers in this column know, my reporting senior and lawful sovereign is His Imperial Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm II. When I finally report in to that great Oberste Heeresleitung in the sky, I expect to do so as the Kaiser’s last soldier. Why? Well, beyond Bestimmung, the unhappy fact is that Western civilization’s last chance of survival was probably a victory by the Central Powers in World War I. Their defeat let all the poisons of the French Revolution loose unchecked, which is the main reason that we now live in a moral and cultural cesspool.