Ross Cameron, and history as bunkum ...

(Above: the road from Gallipoli to Moscow).

As a historian, Ross Cameron makes a great former parliamentarian, philanderer and tepid third rate occasional scribbler for the Sydney Morning Herald, and all his remarkable capacity for infinite silliness is on view in Gallipoli was not Churchill's great folly.

There's something about this time of year that brings out the armchair military historians like a swarm of honking geese, and Cameron shows he doesn't believe in leaving the armchair when defending his hero Winston Churchill.

According to Cameron, the Gallipoli campaign was all about Russia, not the Ottoman Empire, neglecting to mention that in 1914, Russia had gained the agreement of Greece to attack the Dardanelles, but then cried off (or for that matter that Churchill was violently anti-Turk, and wanted to give them a prompt blow to teach them a lesson for joining the wrong side).

Not to worry, along with Churchill, Cameron sounds terribly worried about the position of the Tsar, and in displaying his monarchist loyalties, comes out with this wondrous piece:

Russia had been warming to the world in the decades before the war and moving towards a democratic constitutional monarchy. But its promising future was cruelled by post-Gallipoli isolation.

Uh huh. Promising future? Tell that to a peasant living by munching on shoe leather.

No doubt Cameron thinks the October Manifesto was a splendid response to the Russian Revolution of 1905.

The reality is that Nicholas 11 was a complete klutz, and not just for letting Rasputin hang about the palace with the Tsarita. He, and especially she, disliked the notion of democracy. He fiddled around with the Duma whenever he could, and was so deluded regarding his capacity and skills as to take over conduct of the war in 1915. He was the wrong man for the job at the wrong time ...

Indeed if you want to read more about the Tsaritza and the strength of her opposition to democracy, you can head off here to the New York Times in 1922 (opens as a pdf):

"The Czar rules and not the Duma," she writes in one letter. In another she rages against a responsible cabinet: "You must let them feel your hand. Russians like to feel the whip. People told me that long ago. That is their nature. Love and an iron hand to punish and to lead. Oh that I could pour my strong will into your veins. Be Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible and Emperor Paul all in one."

And so on. Spoken like a genuine democrat on the path to Ross Cameron style democracy.

There's much more nonsense to hand in Cameron's re-writing of history, none more delusional than the notion that somehow the Dardenelles campaign would have prevented Russia from falling into even deeper turmoil and/or revolution. It leads Cameron to this extraordinary conclusion:

Communism enslaved one-third of the world by 1980 but there was nothing inevitable about its advent. When Marx died in 1883, 10 people attended the funeral of an obscure radical. No nation was threatened by communism before 1917.

Not even Russia in 1905? Where an abundance of splitters, socialists and Marxists got into the revolutionary mood?

Well no nation was threatened by war in 1914 - though by golly they'd assembled all the toys and the imperial turf war mind set- until the Serbs and their backers the Russians thought bumping off Archduke Franz Ferdinand and taking on the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be a jolly good romp ...

But I guess there's no point in writing a balanced history when hagiography is the name of the game:

In 1922 Churchill was the discredited author of two failed campaigns. Today he is rightly regarded as the great man of the 20th century. A Google search of ''Gallipoli'' and ''futile'' returns 305,000 responses but it was the most important campaign of World War I. Defeat at Gallipoli may have been disastrous for the Anzacs, the Allies, the Turks and 100 million innocents later killed by communism - but futile it was not.

That's right, it was a disaster, and a failure, and a flop, and it was mishandled on both the strategic and tactical levels, right down to micro military incompetence (let alone the vision thingie), and in the end Stalin gained power in Russia, but somehow it wasn't futile?

Dear sweet absent lord, can we have Cameron to hand when someone needs to assert that black is actually white?

And it's a pity that Cameron stopped his thesis at just that point - the point where futility is overwhelmed - and so doesn't bother to explain or consider the complex relationship that later developed between Churchill and Stalin when they became uncomfortable allies, and Churchill found himself remarking on Stalin's "crude wit ... lucid conversation, phenomenal memory, negotiating skill, and fulsome hospitality". (here).

Churchill even wrote to his wife after one meeting "I like him the more I see him. They respect us here and I am sure they wish to work with us." (here). Yep, he didn't just get Gallipoli wrong.

The point, I guess, is that just a couple of minutes on the full to overflowing intertubes saves me digging through my old history textbooks to discover proof that Cameron is scribbling revisionist bunkum of the most childish, hero-worshipping kind.

In his self-serving twelve volume history of the war (six if you pick up the hardback edition), The Second World War, even Churchill shows a more measured understanding of the twists and turns of history ...

The only question is why, at this time of year, the SMH chooses to publish such a half baked pile of tripe when there are surely many other scribblers around who could do a good and measured job on the subject at hand. Is it a desire to be worse at the game than The Australian in a spiral to the bottom in the quest for hits?

Most likely. Cameron scored a decent number of outraged hits, and poor old abused, long suffering history copped the biggest hit of all ...

Speaking of history, urged on by David (four and a half stars) and Margaret (four stars), the pond belatedly sat down to watch Agora, now in a dvd rental store near you, a sword and sandal pic about Alexandra in the fourth century AD, starring Rachel Weisz as the philosopher Hypatia.

Proving once again you can never trust your ABC, the show turned out to have a poorly written script, with inept direction, and generally bad acting, of the sort you might expect when a show is lured from Spain by Maltese tax dollars.

Apart from the hard work in the frocks, CGI and art departments, the one redeeming and enjoyable feature was the portrait of the Alexandrine Christians of the time as a devious, deceptive, superstitious, treacherous, tricky, narrow minded, anti-science, murderous, stone throwing bunch of vicious hooligans, as bad as the Taliban as they tear apart the Library of Alexandria in a fit of luddite frenzy.

What fun to cheer on the peaceful philosopher mathematician scientist as she tries to determine the movement of the earth around the sun, while the baying Christians - hiss and boo - head off to collect the rocks required for a good stoning.

Unsurprisingly, the show did less than a million at the US box office, but at least it got the bit about the ugly Xian Taliban down to a tee, with the bid by the Christians to silence Hypatia sounding just like the Taliban fundamentalists roaming around the world today.

David and Margaret's review is here, and the real Hypatia has a surprisingly good wiki here, and reading it is a timely reminder of the barbarity and power mongering and misogyny of the early Christian church.

Well that's the show's and the pond's version of events, and we're sticking to it, and it's a mythology you won't discover if you toddle off to re-read Ross Cameron's Christmas message holds true (but you might discover its faint historical echo at a Tony Abbott rally where the word 'bitch' is freely used on signs).

History is more or less bunk, Henry Ford used to say, but I'd settle for Ross Cameron's version of history being more or less bunkum ...

(Below: Saint Cyril, the evil Christian responsible for abusing poor Hypatia. Hiss, boo.

And since there are no extant images of the real Hypatia to be found, let's go with Charles William Mitchell (1854-1903) and his splendid 1885 vision of her suffering. Gentlemen readers may click to enlarge, purely to appreciate the art, but should not expect a similar sight in the movie version of her life. By golly those Victorian painters had a historically accurate understanding of Alexandrine women of the fourth century).