Australia Declared War on Emus in 1932 and the Emus Won

 In 1932 the Australian government declared war on emus.

This is not a joke. It is documented military history. And the emus won.

What Happened

After World War One the Australian government gave former soldiers land grants in Western Australia to farm. The area was already home to large populations of emus. Large mobs of emus, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands, were destroying the crops the farmers had worked hard to establish.

The farmers appealed to the government for help. The government's response was to send the military.

In November of 1932 a small military unit arrived in Western Australia armed with two Lewis guns and ten thousand rounds of ammunition. Their commander was Major G.P.W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery. Their mission was to reduce the emu population.

What they found was not what they expected.

The emus scattered whenever soldiers approached. The birds moved in small groups that were hard to target and impossible to herd together for efficient elimination. When soldiers did manage to open fire the emus absorbed bullets with what observers described as supernatural durability and kept running.

Major Meredith noted that the emus seemed to be able to face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks. He said they could face bullets like Zulus whom even dum-dum bullets could not stop.

After several days of mounting ammunition expenditure and minimal emu casualties the operation was called off.

It was restarted a few weeks later. It went the same way. The military withdrew again.

The ornithologist overseeing the operation recommended the campaign be abandoned. A parliamentary debate in Canberra discussed the failure. A member of parliament suggested the Major involved should be given a military medal but with emus on it.

What the Emus Did Right

Looking at this from a purely tactical standpoint the emus did several things that made them nearly impossible to fight effectively.

They dispersed when threatened instead of bunching together. This is an excellent counter to area weapons like machine guns which require concentrated targets.

They were fast and unpredictable on open ground.

They were physically tough. Emus are large birds built for running across harsh terrain.

None of these were strategic decisions. They were just what emus do. But they were enough to defeat a military operation backed by the Australian government.

The emus were declared the winners by virtually everyone who studied the operation afterward including Australian ornithologists and military historians.

The farmers eventually got relief not from guns but from fencing programs that kept the emus off the crops.

The Great Emu War is funny. It is also a genuinely interesting story about the limits of military solutions to problems that require different approaches. Sometimes the problem is not one that bullets can solve.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

Religion Is Still Being Used to Control People Right Now and Here Is How to See It

 Everything we have talked about in this series, the pharaohs claiming to be gods, the Roman emperors absorbing Christianity into the imperial structure, the Crusades launched for political as well as spiritual reasons, might feel like ancient history.

It is not.

The same patterns are operating right now. The tools have been updated. The underlying mechanics are identical.

What the Pattern Looks Like

Every time a government or political movement uses religion as a tool of control it follows the same basic structure.

Step one. Attach your political agenda to God's will. Not just claim God's blessing but claim that your specific policy positions, your specific enemies, your specific version of social order, are divinely commanded. Anyone who disagrees is not just politically wrong. They are opposing God.

Step two. Use religious identity as a loyalty test. If you are a true believer you support the political agenda. If you oppose the political agenda you must not be a true believer. This makes religious identity and political identity the same thing and makes dissent feel like apostasy.

Step three. Identify an enemy who threatens both the religious and political order. The enemy might be a foreign power, a religious minority, an ethnic group, a political movement. The important thing is that opposing this enemy is framed as a religious duty.

Step four. Promise spiritual rewards for political loyalty. Those who support the cause are not just good citizens. They are soldiers in God's army. Their sacrifices serve a cosmic purpose. Their suffering is meaningful because God is watching and will reward them.

This is the structure of the pharaoh's claim to divinity. It is the structure of the medieval church's claim to political authority. It is the structure of every theocratic government that has ever existed. And it shows up in various degrees in political movements that would not call themselves theocratic.

How to Recognize It

When a political leader claims their authority comes from God rather than from the consent of the governed that is a warning sign. Democratic legitimacy comes from the people. Divine mandate is not subject to election.

When a political movement frames its policy agenda as God's will in ways that make disagreement impossible without challenging faith that is a warning sign. Legitimate religious belief and legitimate political disagreement can coexist. When they cannot that is worth examining.

When religious identity and political identity become completely fused so that leaving one means leaving the other that is a warning sign. Religion and politics are not the same thing. When they are treated as identical someone is benefiting from that fusion and it is usually not ordinary believers.

When political enemies are described in religious terms, as evil, as spiritually corrupt, as agents of darkness, rather than as people with different views that is a warning sign. Dehumanizing opponents through religious language has historically preceded some of the worst violence in human history.

What Is Worth Defending

None of this is an argument against religion itself. Human beings need meaning, community, moral frameworks, and ways of engaging with the questions that science alone cannot answer. Religion has served those needs for all of human history and continues to serve them.

What is worth defending against is the use of religious institutions and religious identity by political actors to serve their own power interests rather than the genuine spiritual needs of their followers.

The pharaoh who claimed to be God was not trying to help his people get to heaven. He was trying to make them easier to govern. Every ruler since who has wrapped their politics in the language of divine will has been doing the same thing.

Knowing that history does not make you anti-religious. It makes you a harder person to manipulate.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Crusades Were Sold as Holy War but the People Who Called for Them Had Political Reasons

 In November of 1095 Pope Urban II stood before a crowd at the Council of Clermont in France and called for a holy war.

He told the assembled nobles and clergy that Jerusalem, the holy city, was in the hands of Muslims and that it was the will of God for Christians to take it back. He promised that those who died on the campaign would have their sins forgiven and would go directly to heaven.

The crowd responded with chants of God wills it.

The First Crusade began the following year. Hundreds of thousands of people died over the following two centuries of crusading. Jerusalem was taken, held, lost, fought over, and fought over again. The human cost was staggering on all sides.

And behind the religious justification were political calculations that the pope and the kings who joined him understood very clearly.

What Urban II Actually Needed

Urban II had a problem. The church and the Holy Roman Emperor had been locked in a bitter dispute over who had the right to appoint church officials. This conflict, called the Investiture Controversy, had destabilized both political and religious authority in Europe for decades.

Urban needed something that could restore the prestige and authority of the papacy. Something that would unite the feuding nobles of Europe under the banner of the church. Something that would give the pope a role as the supreme spiritual and political leader of the Christian world.

A holy war answered all of those needs. It gave the church a mission that overrode local political disputes. It put the pope in the position of commander of a Christian army. It gave restless nobles and knights an outlet for their aggression that the church could direct. And it promised spiritual rewards that no secular ruler could offer.

The Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople had also asked for military help against Muslim incursions. Urban answered that request with something much larger than what was asked for, because a large crusade served the political needs of the western church far better than a small military alliance.

What the Nobles Got Out of It

The nobility of Europe did not join the Crusades purely out of religious devotion either. Land and wealth in Europe were concentrated among the eldest sons of noble families. Younger sons got little or nothing. The Crusade offered younger sons a chance to win land and title in the Holy Land.

The Italian city-states, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, had enormous economic interests in controlling trade routes to the east. Military campaigns that opened or protected those routes were commercially valuable. The Fourth Crusade in 1204 famously ended not in Jerusalem but in Constantinople, which the crusaders sacked and looted while it was still a Christian city, because Venetian creditors redirected the campaign to serve their own commercial interests.

The religious justification was real to many of the people who participated. People genuinely believed they were doing God's will. But the people who organized and directed those beliefs toward specific political and military objectives had interests that were not purely spiritual.

That is the pattern. The faith of ordinary people is real. The way that faith gets organized and directed by institutions with power and resources and political interests is something else.

The Crusades were a holy war. They were also a political project. Both things were true at the same time. And understanding both is the only way to understand what actually happened.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.