Date: Thursday, November 18, 1999, 11:42:46 AM
Subject: The 20th Century
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With only 43 days left until the end of the 20th Century it is possibly
important for us, as members of a public institution that is perhaps
reflective of and dogged by late 20th Century nihilism, apathy and
expediency, to think about the road maps that got us here. Most of us
probably wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the golden age at the end of the
Second World War (1947-1973) that ended in university education being made
free. This Century started with Western Europe controlling over 80% of the
world’s land mass (that included Australia) and ended in Australians being
tricked into voting for the English establishment by the ‘battler elite’
who called for a popular elected president in a country that doesn’t even
have a popularly elected Prime Minister! Technology fed into the politics
of Nationalism, Fascism, Communism and Colonialism and resulted in two
world wars in which one of the most civilised and advanced Western
societies, Germany, committed on of the most barbaric acts of human
history, the holocaust. In 1949 Von Neuman invented the architecture for
what is today’s most common computer (and arguably not much has happened
since except smaller and faster machines). America was the first and last
county to use Nuclear weapons in aggression and destroyed two Japanese
cities killing hundreds of thousands of people. Twice this century Western
civilisation has thought that this is it, its all over. The first time was
during WWI when most of the world’s countries were at war with each other.
The second was during the cold war and the Bay of Pigs. Communism took over
two thirds of the World’s population, then went away. The Avant Garde dies
as does the industrial working class