Last month marked the 80th anniversary of VE Day. It went rather unremarked and unnoticed. The end of the Second World War in Europe was an epoch-making event. It was only 23 years before I was born but now feels a very long time ago. The generation who fought the war are now numbered in the tens rather than the tens of thousands. The living witnesses, those who comprised the Greatest Generation, are being winnowed away by the inevitable ravages of time.
The world has changed a great deal since the end of the Second World War. 1945 marked the beginning of a world dominated by two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Only one of these remains a superpower, the other having disintegrated. China was in the midst of a civil war. The Chinese Government represented at the newly formed United Nations was comprised of Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalists. After the defeat of the Nationalists in 1949, China was ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, who remain in power to this day. Computers were nascent. Cars were not yet widely owned and were yet to be manufactured in Australia. The vast majority of women married and did not work after marriage. Birth rates were rising as the first Baby Boomers arrived on the scene. India was still part of the British Empire. The British Empire still existed.
Suffice to say, much of the above has changed beyond all recognition. Those few people still alive who fought in the Second World War or who experienced it as adults must look at the modern world and, in equal parts, marvel and despair. I hope the sacrifice they and their contemporaries made, to live in a world in which freedom of thought and expression and association was protected, a world in which savage military expansion was resisted and in which tyranny was fought to a standstill, was worthwhile.
And yet, where do we find ourselves today? Tyranny still exists. There are murderous wars happening in various parts of the globe with no obvious end in sight. China is potentially gearing up for the last chapter in the civil war that ended in 1949 with an invasion of Taiwan. Far right wing parties are on the ascendant in Europe and other parts of the world. Racist abuse has become frequently common in the streets, with Muslims and Jews attacked for being obvious representatives of their faiths.
A synagogue has been burned. In Melbourne.
It is hard not to see echoes of the 1930s in the above. As Mark Twain once said, ‘History does not repeat, but it sometimes rhymes.’ The historical rhymes today remind me of the years before the war.
But history need not repeat. It is often said that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
Wesley College will not do nothing. In writing this piece, I express our strong support for all members of our Wesley community who are feeling marginalised and frightened as a result of attacks based on race or religion. We have hosted the Australian Special Envoy against Antisemitism at an assembly this term. Next term, we will be hosting the Special Envoy against Islamophobia. We continue to strive to educate our students to be thoughtful, tolerant citizens of the world.
The Wesley College Chapel at the St Kilda Road Campus has, on both sides, the symbols of Judaism and Islam next to each other, along with those of Buddhism and Hinduism. Everyone in this country deserves the right to live in a country in which they need not fear their fellow citizens as a result of their race or religion, in which they can freely express themselves, and freely associate with whom they wish. This is so self-evident that it is tragic it needs to be said. But it does.
Nick Evans (OW1985)