It is a very strange thing to wish to commemorate the centenary of the start of a war, rather than, as is usual, the centenary or other anniversary of its end.
But 11th November 2018 will be three and a half years after the next General Election.
During a recent edition of Start the Week, Michael Gove described himself as a Whig, and that is precisely what he is.
The First World War was a Liberal war, the prototype neoconservative military intervention far more than the usually cited Second World War was.
Why, throughout the First World War, Britain still had a Liberal Government. It stood alongside the French Radicals against the German National Liberals.
British Liberalism, French Radicalism and German Liberalism were not, and are not, exactly the same thing. But there was, and there is, a pronounced family resemblance. And they all have the same enemies, just as they did a hundred years ago.
The principle of National Liberalism, of the singular mission of a particular Great Power to conform the world to the Liberal vision even by the force or arms, was not in dispute. The only dispute was as to which Great Power had been entrusted with that mission.
But there was a Germany before Unification, and even as part of Unification Germany had to retain many decidedly pre-Enlightenment features. There was a France before the Revolution, and anyone may still see all manner of aspects of her. We all know about the United Kingdom and her predecessor-states.
In the end, of course, only one Great Power, and arguably only one political entity at all, has ever been founded specifically as the Liberal one, expansionist and interventionist accordingly. That is the one to which Michael Gove owes his ultimate allegiance.
Sadly, however, that is not the one of which he aspires to become the Prime Minister.
The Second World War was equally a neocon war.
ReplyDeleteMichael Gove was at least right about the 40-year desecration of our national memory by British history teachers.
ReplyDeleteThe story of EH Dance and his successful Left-wing campaign against "drum-and-trumpet history" in schools is a fascinating one, recently documented by the late historian Ralph Samuel.
I commend "The Case For National History" by Ralph Samuel, (available online) and written long before Michael Gove, to readers interested in how the radical education establishment has used schools to promote multiculturalism and undermine British patriotism ever since 1964.
It continued even under Thatcher , despite Tory attempts to restore narrative British history to the heart of the curriculum.
Like I've never read it!
ReplyDeleteAnd what attempts were those, exactly?
"What attempts were those, exactly?"
ReplyDeleteIn 1988, Minister For Education Mr Baker gave a speech to the Tory Party Conference introducing his Great Education Reform Bill calling for a return to patriotic history in English classrooms:
Mr Baker said: "I want our children to know our history because it shapes who we are today; from the creation of the Church of England under the Tudors, to the evolution of Parliament under the Stuarts, Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill if Rights".
He went on to lambast radical historians who sought to undermine patriotism in the classroom, and to call for narrative British history.
Jack Straw later condemned as "jingoist" Tory proposals to devote at least 50% of the history Curriculum to British history.
It's all in Ralph Samuel 's excellent essay.
Particularly the socialists and the Labour Party's collusion with the liberal progressive radicals in the education establishment to thwart Tory plans.
Gove is only the latest Tory Education Minister to make enemies of the Leftist education establishment and attempt to force them to teach British history.
If they had wanted to do it, then they could have done it.
ReplyDeleteKenneth Baker? Seriously?
Look at the uproar from left-wing historians, hitching up their skirts in horror at Michael Gove's "racist" suggestion that we should actually teach British history to secondary school children, before they move to "World Studies".
ReplyDeleteRegius Professor Richard J Evans condemned Gove's plan as "a Little England view of our past linked to an isolationist view of our future" and sneered at " rote-learning of the patriotic stocking- fillers so beloved of traditionalists".
Good gracious, me. Calm down dear.
I feel sorry for the Tory Education Ministers ( and anyone else) who has had to deal with these people.
Gove had to sack his original, very right-wing, advisers because they refused to produce what he wanted. He did it himself. Not his job.
ReplyDelete