Gerard Henderson, and it's off to the lovely wars again ...

(Above: Colonel Blimp might belong to Britain in the 1930s, but surely as a New Zealander who once worked in Sydney, cartoonist David Low must have stumbled across a few Blimps in the antipodes).

As soon as someone scribbles a line like this, you know you'll soon be off with the pixies:

Australians deserve the opportunity to form their conclusions from the facts.

There are of course facts, and then there are facts, and of course when it comes to history, there's historiography, the study of the methodology of such scribbles. You'd get a fail in Historiography 101 if you wrote an essay blathering and blithering about forming your conclusions from "the facts". Instead let's go to the wiki for a statement of the obvious:

It is commonly recognised by historians that, in themselves, individual historical facts dealing with names, dates and places are not particularly meaningful. Such facts will only become useful when assembled with other historical evidence, and the process of assembling this evidence is understood as a particular historiographical approach.

This is not necessarily to descend into the relativist, though that's the usual charge of "the facts" brigade, often with added slur of "European".

But what to make of a goose that compounds the problem by coming up with this line:

What is needed in the study of Australian history is empiricism.

Say what?

Empiricism is the fifth studio album by Borknagar, and their first studio album to feature Vintersorg (known as the frontman of the band of the same name) on vocals, along with the addition of Tyr on bass. This would mark the last appearance of Jens F. Ryland on guitar.

I keed, I keed. Empiricism comes from the Greek "empeiria", and argues that human knowledge arises from what is provided to the mind by the senses or by awareness through experience.

Well I don't know how much you know by way of the senses or actual experience of World War 1, but our prattling Polonius - long on verbiage, short on actual experience - is at it again, in Australians deserve chance to reassess the Great War.

Polonius, who sometimes goes by the name Gerard Henderson, would have you believe he's an empiricist of the first water, and free of ideological taint, and so impeccably poised to arrive at the real truth of the first world war, unlike 'tainted' historians:

Australia's two most influential general historians - the late Manning Clark and Stuart Macintyre - have essentially presented a left-wing interpretation of Australian military involvements. This is the mindset of many older academics and teachers.

Uh huh. So what are we to make of the first world war, in which some nine million or more combatants (and never mind the civilians, or the offshoots, as in Russia) were killed. And what do we make of the mindset of those presenting a "left-wing" interpretation, as opposed to a Colonel Blimp interpretation ...

Why it turns out it was a just war, that the Allies really won, and that the AIF played a key role in the military victories of 1918.

Yes, the Allies won so well that it was a mere couple of decades before they staged a re-match.

Of course nothing sticks in the pompous craw of Colonel Blimps than the way artists send up the stupendous folly of the first world war, and so naturally Gerard Henderson, a Blimp extraordinaire, gets agitated by Joan Littlewood's play Oh, What a Lovely War! and Blackadder, and historians who dare to question the splendid sacrifices of that noble and just conflict ...

And never mind the reality that the mind sets of the leaders on both sides had failed to catch up with the technological advances, and so the bloody minded futility of trench warfare by cumulative deaths saw machine guns and artillery play a disproportionate role in the fighting ...

But then you have to forget the past to remember the past, in an "empirical" way ...

The Clark/Littlewood thesis has been under attack for about a quarter of a century due to the work of historians and the growing interest of the young in learning about their ancestors and who are not prepared to accept that they died or suffered in vain.

Yes, that's a fine example of the empirical way. To conflate Alan Clark, a Conservative MP who scribbled a couple of books, including The Donkeys, with Joan Littlewood's musical satire, and so ensure they're both tarred with the same brush ... There's an empirical, knock down way to destroy a thesis ...

And my grandfather, who actually served as a machine gunner on the Somme would be rolling in his grave ...

Of course to arrive at this celebratory point of millions dying not in vain but in battle stained glory, you have to skip over some of the donkeys conducting the war during the grim stale-mated trench warfare years, and arrive at the Battle of Amiens in 1918. And of course in writing up the role of Australian troops, you must not mention they were fighting alongside the Canadians. Sssh, not the Canadians ...

And of course you have to erect a mythology that everyone apparently believes the German army wasn't decisively defeated in 1918. Which of course means that you also accept that the victors weren't in a position to inflict the harsh terms of the treaty of Versailles, or that the brooding corporal Adolf Hitler really had nothing to brood about ...

And presumably it means everyone has forgotten about John Monash, knighted by King George V, immediately following the battle, or the success of the creeping barrage of artillery strategy ...

But no wonder, because that's grist to the mill of military historians, and other people have more useful things to do with their lives. It's when you get to this sort of statement, that a residual frenzy and hostility steps in:

Gradually, the Prior thesis is becoming better known. But to accept it, you have to junk the fashionable view that the Allied soldiers in 1914-18 were led by donkeys.

Actually, you don't, oh empiricist king in the land of the blind. There were surely plenty of donkeys, and a few bright sparks like Monash doesn't mean you can suddenly remove all the donkeys (and no matter that Clark invented the phrase lions led by donkeys, and no matter the amount of restoration work and buffing and polishing done on Field Marshal Douglas Haig, he'll do me for a donkey, a man completely out of his depth in the first years of the war).

And what are we to make of this statement - mere rhetoric when compared to empiricism - by British historian Stephen Badsey:

He ... refers to the presently emerging historical consensus as "one of considerable continuity in institutionalised German military brutality from the Franco-Russian War to the Third Reich". To accept this view, you have to recognise that 1914-18 was a just war.

And what are we to make of the emerging historical consensus regarding the continuity in institutionalised British colonial and imperial brutality, from the Indian sub-continent to the Middle East, Africa and the far east (oh what a lovely pair of Opium Wars). To accept this view, you have to recognise that 1914-18 was a just war as the late to catch up Germans, doing their best in Africa, insisted they had a right to catch up on the division of the colonial pie ...

Well that's the sort of simple minded tosh you can scribble when confronted by simple minded tosh, when the assorted prejudices, dressed as facts, are sent out on dress parade for a salute, a national anthem, and the running up of the flag ...

Naturally Henderson has a soft spot for Charles Bean, who in twelve volumes, currently languishing on my shelves, spent a good deal of time inventing the Australian character while recording the war ... and never mind his prejudice about Monash, because he was a Jew, and so regarded by Bean as pushy and not fitting his image of the dinkum digger. But I guess that's just the glories of empiricism at work.

By end of post, Henderson has found time mention the Korean war and to plug a Wain Fimeri documentary about Charles Bean, which thankfully is behind the Foxtel paywall, so I'll be waiting until it turns up in the free world ...

And then he ends with this rousing finale:

From this, viewers can reach their conclusions. It's time for empirical documentaries on the battles of Amiens and Kapyong.

What on earth does he mean? Can we provide an alternative?

From this, readers can reach their conclusions. It's time for "reliant on or derived from observation or experiment" documentaries on the peculiar mindset of Gerard Henderson and his cold war era Colonel Blimp patriotism.

The point being of course that it's rather hard to do an empirical study of the battle of Amiens, seeing as how all the participants are now dead, and so beyond the reach of empiricism. But we do have Gerard Henderson's noggin, the dull pedantic noggin of a wanna be historian, on display each week in the Herald, parading his political and cultural prejudices, and dressing them up as some kind of empirical set of "facts".

But do we need an historian? Or a sociologist? An anthropologist? Or a psychiatrist? For the empirical study ...

(Below: and how did George Orwell describe a Blimp? As a half-pay colonel with a bull neck and diminutive brain. I guess that lets Henderson off the hook. He never made it to half-pay colonel, so the diminutive brain only gets him half way there).