The AFL has cut the men's competition to 17 rounds in response to the coronavirus pandemic, but it is yet to decide whether it will suspend the start of the season.

AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan announced the decision in Melbourne this evening, having consulted the 18 clubs and key league stakeholders.

It means the clubs will play each other once in a modified home-and-away premiership, as opposed to contesting a 23-round season.

A decision on whether the season starts as planned at the MCG on Thursday night will be delayed until Tuesday.

"This unprecedented situation requires an unprecedented response. Football will find a way through," McLachlan told a media conference.

"What we do know is we will get a season away. We don't have all the answers at the moment."

McLachlan also announced that the AFL would suspend the competition if a player tested positive to coronavirus.

The first four rounds of matches will run as scheduled before a new draw is created for the rest of the campaign.

State leagues — including the VFL, SANFL, WAFL and NEAFL — have been postponed until May 31.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-16/coronavirus-afl-to-reduce-season-...

One of the major problems with AFL dealing with such pandemic is similar to ScoMo delaying the Friday shut-down because of sponsors, god (see: back then he was a worry... ), commercial interests and TV rights...

Picture at top by Gus Leonisky — at Anzac Bridge, Sydney.

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35884

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35818

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/36369

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Our politicians have been insisting this Anzac Day will be “unlike any other”.

Yes, isolation will prevent most from attending traditional services. Commemoration, as with so much else today, will be largely virtual – a matter of mind over place, imagination over reality.

But in essence there’ll be little difference today about the way Australia does Anzac, with its long reliance on the dominance of belief over history in national creation mythology.

For weeks we’ve been told Australia is at war with Covid-19 – we even had “our Dunkirk moment” one federal minister said, unable to emphasise the gravity of spending $130bn on wage subsidies without a nod to (British) military/civilian historical enterprise.

So, hold your breath for a barrage of speeches where politicians conflate the Australian experience of endurance (though not the ultimate failure) at Gallipoli with the mitigation of the biggest public health and economic threat the world has seen since the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago.

The prime minister foreshadowed it: “This year ... we will still remember the sacrifice of those who gave so much for us at Gallipoli and on many fronts, as we ourselves give what we can to protect Australian lives while we face this terrible virus.”

This is a public health and economic cataclysm. It is not a war.

Those at the vanguard of resisting the coronavirus are not Anzacs. They are nurses, doctors, police, ambos, orderlies, cleaners, delivery drivers, supermarket workers and public servants. Today, as they did 100 years ago when the world was in the grip of the Spanish flu (killing 50 million globally including some 13,000 Australians), they work for the national interest, many putting their lives at risk.

How will we remember them? Hopefully with more respect and dignity than Australia did under Billy Hughes, hell-bent on forging a white Australian story of national genesis out of the ashes of the first world war despite having so much other continental history, Indigenous and other, to drawn on.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/25/politicians-take-n...

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For the first time in a century Australians have not had a public celebration for Anzac Day, and this reminds us at Sydney University Graduate Choir of the extraordinary work, An Australian War Requiem, composed by Christopher Bowen to a text by Pamela Traynor to commemorate the outbreak of the Great War, WWI, in August 1914.

So this ANZAC Day weekend we are, for the first time, making the entire premiere performance (August 2014) video available online, free of charge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw1i0HBDs9A&feature=youtu.be

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35884

The unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht came into effect on May 8, 1945 at 11 p.m. Western European Time. 75 years later, Europe is again being put to the test, writes the author György Dalos

For the European continent, World War II ended on May 9, 1945. At least, that is the date the anti-Hitler coalition agreed should be marked as Victory Day, instead of May 8, when some units of the German Wehrmacht were still pursuing military activities, in defiance of the act of surrender at Reims. At the same time, fighting in the Far East between Japan and the United States was still raging as intensely as ever.

Only the two atomic bombs dropped by the Americans on Hiroshimaand Nagasaki, as well as the entry of the USSR into the fighting in Manchuria in northeast China, led to the unconditional surrender of the Japanese Empire on September 2, 1945 — the final act in the global conflagration that had erupted almost exactly six years earlier.

The 'Communist threat'

Amid the euphoria of peace, however, the first cracks in the Allies' solidarity were becoming apparent. Many contemporary witnesses and historians considered Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946 to be the start of the new, open confrontation.

On his trip to the United States, and in the presence of US President Harry Truman, the British statesman — by then no longer prime minister — warned the Western world of the "communist threat" by announcing: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow."

Read more: The Yalta Conference, where the postwar world began

Although Churchill also expressed in the speech his "strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people" and his "wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin," he was also pretty unambiguous in calling for the Western powers to show greater readiness for war against the Soviets. He was convinced that "there is nothing [the Soviets] admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness."

In his essay "You and the Atomic Bomb," the British author George Orwell coined the catchy term "Cold War" to define the state of the world that this precise demarcation of borders had produced.

A 'cold peace offer'

The metaphor of the "Iron Curtain" became manifest in the so-called "technical barrier and fortification system” that sealed off the Eastern Bloc from the Western states. Between Hungary and Austria alone it consisted of an entanglement of double rows of barbed wire that stretched for 243 kilometers (151 miles), as well as 3 million anti-personnel mines. Even some "real socialist" countries created monstrosities inside their own geographic space, such as the Berlin Wall or the 170,000 bunkers for the "emergency" that Albania fabricated for propaganda purposes.

The Iron Curtain speech was not the trigger for the long-lasting conflict between the former allies and victors; rather, it was the fixation of their common planning for a post-war order, in which Churchill had been personally involved. In the midst of the war, it must have become clear to the Western Allies that the Soviet Union's disproportionate commitment and sacrifice meant it would claim corresponding compensation and future territorial protection zones, and that it would be quite capable of lending military weight to its demands.

Churchill's concerns were with how Moscow could be given its own sphere of influence while also curbing its desire to expand. In this spirit, his speech contains, as well as the declaration of cold war, a discreet offer of an equally cold peace. Whole generations grew up in this "cold peace," a balance of fear and nuclear parity. No wonder that, a good 40 years later, they reacted with such enthusiasm to the opening of the border and the dismantling of the Wall, as if these events had ended all wars for them, achieving a peace in which there were no victors and no defeated, and a return home. The idea of a "House of Europe" was the magic formula.

Europe to the test

Despite their subsequent division, the triumph of the anti-Hitler coalition of 1945 ensured alternating phases of tension and relaxation: relative stability for our battered continent. Elsewhere, in the Middle East, in Africa and Asia, and for some years now also in Ukraine, there is armed conflict, the consequences of which reach us every day in the form of refugee movements.

Read more: World War II and coronavirus economics: The perils of comparison

Even the calm in our own region is relative. The integration process initiated in 1989 is by no means running smoothly; euroskeptic or anti-Europe parties are emerging in almost all countries, and some are even in positions of power. The current, drastic, global pandemic now poses a new challenge with regard not only to coming together in solidarity to combat the terrible pathogen, but also to thinking about what will come afterward. In a way, Europe is being put to the test yet again.

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-may-1945-the-start-of-a-cold-peace/a-53334577

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The patogen is nasty, but possibly not as nasty as we are to ourselves... and to each others. Isolation sux.

Having grown up in the ruins of post-war Germany, the acclaimed director, screenwriter and producer spoke with Sophie Co. host Sophie Shevardnadze about lessons that can be gleaned from one of the darkest episodes in human history.

The atrocities carried out by the Nazis were the result of a lockstep narrative of “demonization” which replaced facts, Herzog observed. He argued that scapegoating people and entire nations – “Jewish people, the French, the Russians,” and so on – can still be seen “very clearly” today.

It is not so much what is factually happening, it’s who owns the narrative. And we have to be very, very careful and watchful about looking at the media. What are the media doing? Is there some sort of almost collective brainwashing going on or not? … [W]e have to be quite vigilant and we should think on our own.

The “industrialized mass murder” of the Holocaust – a mechanized system of death not seen before in human history – required manufactured consent, he stressed.

But questioning prevailing narratives might not be enough. Should fascism re-emerge, Herzog vowed that he would sacrifice his life to stop it. The filmmaker said he would “take up arms” and “defend democracy” if there’s another Holocaust.

As long as there’s breath in me, it’s not going to happen, because I will fight back actively. I will arm myself and I will fight back. And you will see me dead, and only then it may happen.

The tragedies and triumphs of World War II may seem distant and foreign to current generations, but he argued that similar sacrifice and cooperation can be seen in the current fight against Covid-19. He urged people to show “discipline” in order to overcome the pandemic, stressing that the virus must be “starved.”

For Herzog, the heroes of our times are those who have selflessly volunteered as test subjects as the world rushes to develop a vaccine for coronavirus.

The worldwide health crisis will likely alter our “collective behavior,” he observed – a change that will hopefully be for the better. As Herzog pointed out, Germany once waged a catastrophic war against the Soviet Union, but now he is “happily married” to a Russian.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/488108-werner-herzog-ww2-holocaust-fascism/

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