Between 1929 and the early 1930s, the Communist government in the Soviet Union had conducted a policy of genocide against the peasant farmers of the Ukraine, called the kulaks.

One of the benefits that was promised to come from getting rid of those vermin, those blood-suckers, would be the establishment of collective farms. Food production would be increased. Everyone would be happy. From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.

What could possibly go wrong with forcing people onto collective farms. Many of the people that were forced onto the collective farms, weren’t farmers. The kulaks had been professional farmers – but they were all gone. And good riddance to them eh comrades!

Now we could get a view from our collective farm – happy days were coming, the socialist paradise was almost here.

Tag words: Soviet Union; Ukraine; blood-suckers; Communists; Joseph Stalin; Czars; Tsars; Nazis; NKVD; starvation; malnutrition; peasants; Vasily Grossman; Life and Fate; Forever Flowing; Anna Sergeyevna; Great Reset; World Economic Forum; Communist Party;

Today many people tell us that we should forget about history, we don’t need it. But then those same people tell us about all of the sins of our past that we must be deeply ashamed of today. If they say history doesn’t matter, then why are they telling us that we should be ashamed of our history. Slavery. Colonialism.

There’s far more interesting history to talk about than those old issues. That history really interesting history doesn’t go back hundreds of years. Times from which there isn’t one living person. This interesting history is about recent times and about people today who will do the same things again if they think it necessary. No European nation, the United States, Australia, New Zealand are going to be bringing back slavery and colonialism. Let’s get closer to current times, with people still alive today who suffered from monstrous wrongs, or whose children are still alive and remember when damage was done to their parents. This history has important lessons for us today. It teaches us a lot about what and why those people telling us to forget about history especially mean forget about the history of their beliefs – and the actions of people from those times that are being repeated today in a different form, and who may still yet decide that it is necessary to do it all over again.

This programme is about one of the greatest horrors that happened less than 80 to 90 years ago. There’s scarcely anything that can rival it. It’s history that you may not have heard about before, but you must.

Perhaps after you’ve listened to this story you might think that you would like to know more about history – that you absolutely must know more about history. Especially when the ideology that murdered over 8 million people is rising again.

Stick around for the next twenty minutes, if you’re willing and learn something that you need to know.

Tag words: Slavery; Colonialism; Soviet Union; Karl Marx; proletariat; Tsar; Mao Zedong; power comes from the barrel of a gun; happiness is a warm gun; Revolution; Collectivization; kulak farmers; All property is theft; Hugh Jackman; Les Miserables; Great Reset; Communists; Heinrich Himmler; SS; Walter Duranty; Mendal M. Khataevich; Soviet agriculture; NKVD; KGB; GPU; Joseph Stalin; Vasily Grossman; Forever Flowing; Anna Sergeyevna; Ivan Grigoryevich; Great Patriotic War; Nazis; Alexander Solzhenitsyn; The Gulag Archipelago; Ukraine;

At the end of the magnificent funeral service for Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, a lone piper stood playing a piece. The piece is known by the name “The Flowers of the Forest”.

In Eric Bogle’s moving song, No Man’s Land, he asks the unresponsive Private William McBride, whose gravesite he’s standing next to, “Did they play the Flower o’ the Forest” at his funeral.

The Flowers of the Forestwas composed as a lament for the army of King James IV, remembering an much earlier war, a much earlier battle when the flower of Scottish manhood were slain with their king on the battlefield of Flodden in September 1513.

In 1513, the Scots had invaded England to support their long and close allies, the French. It was on 9 September 1513 that the Scots army, under King James IV, faced off against the English forces of King Henry VIII, under the command of Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. The battle was ferocious and bloody - men were felled by artillery, arrows, pikes, bills and swords. Around 14,000 men died, including James IV, who had the dubious and, I’m sure unwanted honour of being the last British king to die in battle.

The composition of this song began with a fragment of a very old ballad. Mrs Patrick Cockburn of Ormiston drew on this fragment to write a full song. Then in the mid 18th century Miss Jane Elliot, daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto, Lord Chief Justice Clerk of Scotland, drew on Mrs Cockburn's work to make her lyric a much finer piece than what Mrs Cockburn had originally written.

This pipe tune is well known to anyone who has attended a Remembrance Day service in Scotland, but the song is all too seldom heard nowadays.

The tune is held in such reverence that very often the piper will practice it in absolute privacy, so no one else can hear it. Then play it only in public at funeral service, such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s, or at memorial services.

Now what horrors were the Australians going to have to face, after the bloodbath of the Nek to bring the Gallipoli campaign to an end. Everyone expected a bloodbath if they tried to evacuate. Join me now to learn that final story.

Tag words: Charles Bean; Gallipoli; Prince Philip; Duke of Edinburgh; The Flowers of the Forest; Battle of Flodden; King James IV; King Henry VIII; Thomas Howard; Earl of Surrey; James IV; Patrick Cockburn; Miss Jane Elliot; Sir Gilbert Elliot; Remembrance Day; Australian War Memorial; Ashmead-Bartlett; Andrew Fisher; at Suvla; Winston Churchill; Brigadier-General Charles White; Battle of the Somme; Gaba Tepe; Victor Trumper; Turks; Shell Green; Major George Macarthur Onslow; Brigadier-General Granville Ryrie; Charles Bingham; the Nek; Colonel John Paton; Australian Light Horse; General Monash; 

In my last programme I told the story of the ANZACs heading to Egypt and then the first day’s landings on Gallipoli. At the end of that programme I told you that by night time the commanders on the ground had some surprising feelings about how the landings had gone. I said that I’d talk about that in the next programme. So here I am. Let me tell you about what our generals thought about the Gallipoli campaign.

Charles Bean, the first embedded journalist, who landed at Gallipoli with the ANZACs on that first day, whose inspiration and leadership led to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, and who wrote the official history of Australia’s experience in World War I wrote about the feelings at the end of that first ANZAC Day:

“... clearly something was in the wind. In a minute or two I heard what it was — some question as to whether we were to hold on or to embark at once ... “

The Allied generals were reporting back to the highest command that their brigades were saying that they hadn’t established secured positions. They wanted the troops withdrawn immediately – that night. Things were really grim on that first night. In reality the position of the Australians and our allies never got any better until their withdrawal in December.

But it would have been a huge call to end this massive undertaking in less than 24 hours. The reputations of some of the top people in England would have faced ruin. But that’s not a good reason to make that sort of decision and there was in fact a good reason why no evacuation took place that night – or could possibly have taken place that night. Evacuation, with the resources that they had was impossible. So the opportunity to bring this doomed operation to an end quickly was either missed or more probably wasn’t even an option. Many lives were going to be lost over the next months without anything to show for it, except that Australia, as a strong, proud and independent nation was emerging.

Tag words: ANZAC; Gallipoli; Charles Bean; Australian War Memorial; Victoria Crosses; George Moor; Hampshire Regiment; General Henry de Lisle; Major Cass; Colonel James McCay; ANZAC Cove; Lone Pine; the Pimple; the Nek; Russell’s Top; Baby 700; Australian 3rd Light Horse Brigade; Lieutenant-Colonel Noel Brazier; 10th Light Horse; 

In 1995 the TV Series “Mr Bean” went to air for the first time. It was a strange programme. Mr Bean was mostly silent – with only a handful of words being spoken by him throughout the whole three series. The audience reaction to him varies a lot. I think the cleverness of the wordless comic actions is brilliant and I love the show. My wife finds Mr Bean to be an incredibly nasty human being, which he is. She also can’t contain her discomfort at the situations that he gets himself into.

There’s a saying "Nothing can be made foolproof because fools are so ingenious". And that is what the Mr Bean series is all about.

But ANZAC Day’s approaching and this programme all about ANZAC Day. So why am I talking about Mr Bean, his silent comedy and foolishness? Well because it echoes my story about ANZAC Day, how the experience of the fighting at Gallipoli changed how Australians had seen themselves from Englishmen abroad to start with, to Australians completely at home with themselves as the War dragged on, and the remarkable qualities of those Australian soldiers compared to the English soldiers that they were fighting alongside with.

And no, I haven’t gone completely mad. There is a Mr Bean in my story. Mr Charles Bean. He was the first embedded war correspondent in modern terms. He was also the man who was destined to write the official history of Australia’s experience in World War I – and written by a man who had seen it up close and lethal.

So the whole silent movie thing of Mr Bean harkens back to the time of the Great War and just afterwards, with comedians like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. And some of the things that happened – well they could have been funny if thousands of men didn’t pay with their lives, or in the case of those lucky enough, or maybe not, to have survived, who carried the scars of what they went through until the very day that they died. Mostly with their families, sometimes never leaving the hospitals that they were sent to after being gassed or losing their minds. Their families typically knowing nothing of what they had been through and perhaps grateful for it.

Tag words: Mr Bean; ANZAC Day; Gallipoli; Charles Bean; Charlie Chaplin; Buster Keaton; British Empire; Peter Weir; Mel Gibson; Mark Lee; Frank Dunn; Archie Hamilton; 10th Light Horse; Edwin Bean; Lucy Bean; Oxford University; Hertford College; Justice William Owen; Sydney Morning Herald; journalist; Official History of World War I; HMS Powerful; First World War; Lieutenant-Colonel Ernst Swinton; Eye Witness; Admiral Horatio Nelson; Battle of Trafalgar; HMAT Orvieto; Australian Imperial Forces; HMAS Melbourne; Emden; HMAS Sydney; Royal Australian Navy; Kapitan Karl von Muller; Dardanelles; Turks;

The remarkable thing about chess is that you can’t lose. I mean you’re looking down on the board. You can see every piece that your opponents has and where they are. You can see every piece that you have and where they are. Does it get any better than that! You can’t lose. But is that the right way to look at it? Because that’s how some of the top military people in the US thought it worked when the second Gulf War was looming. They were totally wrong. I’ll tell you exactly how disastrously this panned out for them. What they thought would happen and what really happened.

Tag words: Gulf War; Operation Desert Storm; Saddam Hussein; Kuwait; Communist China; Joint Forces Command; JAFCOM; Millennium Challenge; Common Relevant Operational Picture; CROP; Napoleon; Kevin McAlister; Home Alone; Paul Van Riper; President Harry Truman; Korean War; Mike Company; 1st Marine Division; Marine Corp; Gary Klein; Sources of Power; D-Day landings; German High Command; Malcolm Gladwell; Blink;

This series of programmes is all about how war has improved all of our lives. And this programme’s all about how modern heart surgery happened thanks to war and because of one man’s struggle to overcome what, up to and during World War II, was an area of surgery that no right thinking surgeon would do. Heart surgery.

The heart’s an incredible pumping machine. It’s the size of a grapefruit, it beats slightly more than once a second, 100,000 times a day. Depending on how long you live, it can have up to 3.5 billion beats in a lifetime. Your heart pumps out blood with enormous force. If your aorta is severed your heart will send a fountain of blood 3 metres up into the air.

It was only during World War II, and because of one remarkable man, that surgeons began to perform surgery on the heart. Until then it had been a no-go area. After the war, heart surgery was revolutionised.

This is an amazing story.

Tag words: heart surgery; World War II; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Joseph Stalin; Winston Churchill; Dwight E Harken; US Army Medical Corps; defribillator; intra-aortic ballon pump; pacemaker; Werner Forssmann; National Socialist Party; Adolf Hitler; Nazi Party; National Socialist German Physicians’ League; Leonard Hayflick; 

Back in the happy days before the white imperialist invaders came to Australia’s shores everyone was happy, healthy and contented. Well maybe I’m exaggerating a bit.

If you weren’t healthy then you would die. A hunter gatherer community, that lived from day to day, needed everybody to be contributing to making their society work.

So if you weren’t healthy, and couldn’t keep up when your clan moved on, then you weren’t of much use and you would soon die.

So life in Australia before the arrival of the English was unforgiving. It takes a society that can farm and produce more than enough for each day, that can store the surplus for the future, to be able to allow people who aren’t contributing to what’s available for everyone to stay alive.

But things weren’t all fun in England at the time when Governor Philip brought the First Fleet to Australia. His job was to set up a small penal colony on the east coast of Australia. Period. He wasn’t a conqueror. He set up the new colony at Sydney Cove, not Botany Bay which had seemed like the place to aim for from Captain Cook’s reports of his first voyage. There were no plans of conquering the continent. The spread of settlers across Australia got totally out of hand. It was the result of individuals who decided that they actually liked living in Australia and would like to make a real go of it. And it was the sheep brought to Australia that made that spreading out from Sydney happen.

For at least half of the people who were left back in England, and probably much more than that, things weren’t in a lot of respects nearly as good as they were for the nomadic Aborigines living in Australia. The Australian aborigines mostly had a warm climate so that they didn’t need heavy clothing to keep them warm for a good part of the year, without which they’d die. Generally the aborigines had a plenty of food. They had a level of medical help that was no better and no worse than what most Europeans living in rural villages had. But things in Europe were on the cusp of a monumental change that would radically alter the balance between living in Europe in the eighteenth century and living in the Australia of 60,000 years before. The industrial revolution.

But even with those changes that the industrial revolution brought, having people live in the crowded European cities of the industrial revolution, with poor to no sanitation, appalling air quality, terrible diet, was having a dramatic effect. It was an effect that it turned out to be one that governments couldn’t ignore. It was because of war and the threat of war that these health and fitness problems were going to be soon addressed and eventually fixed. This is the story of how we all got to have gyms and fitness centres everywhere, good food, and healthy living that took advantage of all of the advances that had been made through the industrial revolution but had not yet delivered better lives to everyone.

Tag words: Second Boer War; British Army; The Committee on Physical Deterioration; Charles Bean; Generals without brains and an army without physique; Field Marshall Haig; Pompey Elliot; Trades Union Congress; Labour Representation Committee; Labour Party; Workers’ Compensation insurance; Karl Marx; Das Kapital; Governor Philip; First Fleet; Sydney Cove; Botany Bay; industrial revolution; Mark Zuckerberg; Yuval Noah Harari; Homo Deus; Rudyard Kipling; Great War;

Human beings have always known about blood. In civilisations since the earliest stone age hunter gatherers until today, too much blood has been spilt. But what we’ve known about blood has, for most of time, been completely wrong. Thank God we finally got it right.

This programme’s about the world that war has made so in this programme I’m going to tell you a bloody good story – which is what war is all about after all – about how we finally got to understand blood and save millions of lives.

Tag words: Shylock; William Shakespeare; Merchant of Venice; Galen; Roman Empire; David Bentley-Hart; Paracelsus; William Harvey; Exercitato Anatomica; Richard Lower; George Washington; Arthur Coda; Royal Society of London; Karl Landsteiner; Carl von Ossietzky; Plasma; Charles Drew; Dr John Beattie; John Scudder; Blood for Britain; Blitz; American Red Cross; Out for Blood; Anastasia Lunquist; Ernie Pyle; Major General Norman T. Kirk; 

War has shaped all of our lives. You may not like it. You might think that war is evil. That war must come to an end. But whatever you think, every day of your life, and throughout every day more than you’d like to think, so many of the things that you do or get the benefit of, have been shaped or come out of war.

Anyway enough of that depressing talk. How about you just go into that coffee shop there and get your starter for the day – a nice cup of coffee. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Why not get a croissant – with ham and cheese. Maybe a sweet croissant if that’s more your style.

Why am I talking about croissants? Well the first people who sat down to enjoy a croissant did it because something marvellous had just happened. It was the year 1683 and people were sitting down to try the newest pastry delight. It had been created to celebrate the ending of the danger of the Christian world being conquered by the invading armies of Islam. Until just then it looked like that was going to happen. But thanks to the arrival of the brilliant Polish army, their amazing looking winged hussars, and the armies of the Holy Roman Empire, the army of the Ottoman Empire, commanded by Merzifoniu Kara Mustafa Pasha, was decisively defeated. The threat of Islam to Europe now slowly and forever re-traced its steps back to modern Turkey where they had come from. Their battle standards, the crescent moon, became immortalised in the crescent moon shaped pastry delight of the croissant the same shape that we still enjoy today.

So what else to we have to thank war for? It’s going to take some time to answer that but let me get started.

Tag words: Ottoman Empire; Merzifoniu Kara Mustafa Pasha; Islam; penicillin; Alexander Fleming; Robert Koch; Max von Pettenkofer; cholera; Barry Marshall; Nobel Prize; Howard Florey; Therapuetuic Research Corporation; Boots Pharmaceutical; Glaxo Laboratories; Wellcome Foundation; Adolf Hitler; Albert Einstein; President Franklin Roosevelt; Ernst Chain; Albert Alexander; Mary Hunt; Nazi Germany; Reinhard Heydrich; The Man with the Iron Heart; Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich; Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich; Auschwitz; Treblinka; Wannsee; Nazi death camps; Operation Reinhard; Dr Morell; Winston Churchill; D-Day; staphylococuccus aureus; golden staff; bacteria;